When does the feeling of time passing faster or slower emerge? The role of interoceptive awareness.

Abstract

The question raised in this study was: when and why does the feeling of a change in the passage of time arise? Participants were instructed to press a button as soon as they perceived a change in the speed of the passage of time. After each detection, they indicated whether they felt that time was "speeding up" and "slowing down", and rated the intensity of this feeling. They also rated their affective states: happiness, sadness, arousal, boredom, attention, and temporal expectation. Following the experimental session, they completed a questionnaire assessing their individual interoceptive awareness. Results showed that the time detection, the intensity of the passage-of-time, and the number of detections differed between participants who reported time slowing down and those who reported time speeding up. In addition, results suggested that distinct mechanisms could be linked to the feelings of time slowing down and time speeding up. The feeling of time slowing down was associated with interoceptive awareness linked to boredom, whereas the feeling of time speeding up was associated with happiness linked to heightened attention captured by the video, with interoceptive awareness playing no significant role. Based on the asymmetrical phenomenology of the slowing and speeding up of time, we proposed a model of variations in the judgment of the passage of time.