How can we alter the Perception of Time ?!

Disclaimer: Master's thesis research that gained me a spot to continue the nature of study through an ERC grant in Trieste, Italy       

What is Time Perception?

Time perception refers to one’s subjective processing of the time around them.

However, your ability to accurately judge the passage of time is affected when your body is:

- Preparing for motor movements

- Creating a mental representation of a motor movement

- After performing a movement

- While being in motion

- Being perceptually adapted to a motor movement

To simply put, when your body is in motion, your ability to perceptually judge time, alters.

Let's take an example of Tennis players, their skill learning has led them to predict the accuracy in timing of the ball approaching towards them. The speed of the ball is <3s and the player processes the placement of ball in few milliseconds.

Similarly, the study wants to understand the relationship between if skill learning could have an impact on time perception or not.

The Hypothesis

In this research study, I attempted to investigate a specific component of the sensorimotor system function- motor skill learning and how it affects our perception of time.

The internal clock calibration that occurs during learning of a motor skill could be generalized to the perceptual calibration occurring while perceiving time. This could lead to enhanced discrimination of time to its very milliseconds.

In the study, participants tried discriminating durations (short or long durations when compared to a standard duration) of a moving sine wave to its milli-second level. They performed this task either after undergoing the motor skill learning task or a non-learning motor task.

Methods followed

Setup

• The study was conducted on a BenQ monitor with an optimum measured visual angle.

• A skill learning tablet with stylus was placed under a wooden plank such that the participant cannot see the movement of their arm but receive feedback only via visuals on the screen.

  
  

• There were 2 groups of 12 participants each. The control group was the non-learning group and the experimental group was the learning group.

  
  

Study Structure

• A baseline task was performed of duration discrimination without any skill learning to measure the baseline accuracy of duration discrimination

• Later on, the participant has 3s pause before the skill learning session started.

• The skill learning involves the drawing of a connecting line from the centre yellow dot to the blue dot with the green dot being the cursor.

• However, the green dot moves with a latency matched with the duration of the sine grating thereby affecting the efficiency to draw a straight line until they adapt their physical movements over time (learn the skill)

• They had to draw the line and discriminate duration for 10 cycles with 24 trials each.

• The screen progression had an inter stimulus interval of 500ms.

  
  

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How the Data looked?

Fig 1: The following graph shows how the participant learnt a motor skill task over 240 trials. We could see the fall in their error rates as they progress across the trials.

Fig 2: The following graph shows how the participant did the same motor skill task over 240 trials but did not learn anything. We could see the stagnancy in the error rates as they progress across the trials.

A single factor ANOVA analysis was conducted between the duration discrimination task and the motor learning/ no-learning phase. The results showed no statistical significant effect between the learning and no-learning conditions on time perception at p<0.05, [F (1, 28) = 0.2143, p= 0.6469].

Since there were no differences observed between subjects, another ANOVA test was conducted to verify if the learning group's baseline (no motor task at all) and main visual time discrimination task (with motor learning task) measurements showed any statistical significance from each other. There was no statistically significant effect seen between them as well [F (1,25) = 0.5089, p= 0.4822].

This leaves us to conclude that the learning a motor task did not influence visual time discrimination.

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Discussion

This was an interesting testing to extrapolate our understanding on how consumer's perception of time gets affected when their body is in motion.

As simple as, if they are browsing through groceries and don't know the exact layout of the supermarket, they are more likely to spend more time to figure it out. They don't realize that they are spending more time than usual to just purchase groceries. This leads them to buy more products.

However, if they are frequent visitors, their bodily movements are trained to go to a specific aisle, shelf. For visitors like these, their perception of time remains unaltered and they make quick concise purchase and their accurate on how much time they spent in the shop. Thus, bodily movement and its adaptation in the environment could still affect the time spent shopping for something.

Nevertheless, from the current study it has come to light that variables apart from skill learning, there are other ways in which our perception of time is enhanced/degraded. Various scientific studies have shown that the brain processed movement first over time (such as duration, speed) owing to our evolutionary constraints. The study could have extended its scope in seeing how movement detection improved time perception.

This could also help us understand how consumers perception of time in an environment can be affected when they detect constant movement across the shop (people moving all around). With an extra layer of social proofing could elevate their loss of sense of time.

Real time solution:

So how could we prevent the consumers from making habitual movements inside the shop and at the same time make them feel that they are not wasting time?

We alter the stacked up shelves alternatively. So every month, the stacked up shelves move by one/two rows or columns. Eg: I want to buy milk, I always find it on the 2nd aisle 3rd shelf. Now, we alter it to 2nd aisle, 4th shelf. In this way we are microscopically altering the consumer learning pattern one step at a time and at the same time not compromising on the user's time period for purchase.

Based on the consumer groceries buying data in the U.S, its seen that a consumer frequents a supermarket 1.6 times a week. Now within 2-3 visits in a month, a user can learn the location of items in the shop. So, altering the best-seller items position in the shelves, can prevent means of motor habituation and thereby increase sales with a side-effect of frustration.

However, the lab-based study proved otherwise that movement learning did not affect the way you perceive time. The negative results could be owing to the study being more as perceptual sciences rather than being ecological. If the same experiment was simulated in an actual supermarket, then hypothetically, the proposed results could have been found with increased statistical significance.

Future Directions

• I continued the study in SISSA, Trieste,Italy to understand the relationship between Visual speed and Motor learning/adaptation.

  
  

• Also the study extended the scope to identify the SMA brain regions responsible for processing visual speed and duration in milliseconds via an fMRI study.