Effects of voluntary orienting of attention on temporal estimation

Exogenous orienting of attention can affect the mental processing of time, suggesting the existence of a spatial representation for temporal durations, with shorter and longer durations represented on the left and on the right of a mental time line, respectively. In this study, we investigated the effects of voluntary shifts of attention on the perception of temporal durations. Participants were asked to follow with their gaze a dot moving on the screen (smooth pursuit conditions), or to fix a central dot (control condition), while listening to an acoustic stimulus (pink noise) varying in duration (from 600ms to 1400ms). Upon stimuli offset, they had to reproduce the temporal duration of the acoustic stimulus by pressing a button on the keyboard. Data from two experiments were collected online. In Experiment 1 the dot moved horizontally, either leftward or rightward from the screen centre. In Experiment 2 the dot moved vertically, either upward or downward from the screen centre. Experiment 3 was a laboratory-based replication of Experiment 1. The results showed, across the three experiments, a tendency to overestimate stimulus duration, which decreased with increasing duration. When the dot moved horizontally (Experiments 1 and 3), smooth pursuit induced smaller overestimation as compared to the control condition. We observed an effect of pursuit direction only in Experiment 3, where rightward pursuit induced larger overestimation as compared to leftward pursuit. This effect, however, was not consistent across all the analyses. Taken together, our results indicate that the spatialization of time is not systematic. We suggest that different effects of voluntary and involuntary attention on time processing, as well as task characteristics, might contribute to explaining these contrasting findings.