15:00 - 16:30
Wed—Casino_1.801—Poster3—85
Wed-Poster3
Room:
Room: Casino_1.801
Learning to feel vibrations: Associatively learned boredom but not stress modulates time perception
Wed—Casino_1.801—Poster3—8501
Presented by: Müge Cavdan
Müge Cavdan *Bora CelebiKnut Drewing
Justus Liebig University Giessen
Emotional states influence our perception of time; for instance; time feels shorter when we are stressed about meeting a deadline but drags when we are bored, such as while waiting in a doctor’s office. Associative learning allows pairing emotional states with a neutral stimulus through repeated exposure. Here, in the context of time perception, we investigated whether neutral stimuli such as vibrations acquire emotional value when linked with stress or boredom, potentially influencing the experience of time presented alone. First, we ascertained the efficiency of stress (multitask framework, public speech with counting) and boredom (peg turning and video from (Markey et al., 2014) induction tasks. In the main experiment using within-subjects design, individuals underwent stress learning, boredom learning, and no learning sessions across three days. During the learning phase, individuals performed either boredom or stress tasks while exposed to a neutral vibration pattern every 5 seconds via a custom multimodal haptic vest (Celebi et al., 2023). After the tasks, participants completed questionnaires on their anxiety and boredom (State-Trait-Anxiety-Inventory and short version of State-Boredom-Scale). Following a 1-hour break, participants performed a temporal bisection task. They first familiarized to discriminate between anchor durations of dots – 400 ms (short) and 700 ms (long). Subsequently, they judged whether the duration of a dot on the screen, lasting 400-700 ms, resembled the previously learned short or long one, while the associated vibration patterns were presented. Boredom-associated vibration patterns made time feel longer, while the stress-associated vibration pattern had no significant effect on time perception.
Keywords: time perception, associative-learning, timing, stress, boredom, tactile perception