The Influence Of Embodying Movement On Time Perception

This study investigates the applicability of Embodied Cognition in Timeperception. Grounded approaches to cognition argue that sensorimotor experiencesplay an important role when people think about movement. Recent empirical evidencesupports the idea that participants will embody the things they experience. Severalimagery studies have shown that observing another individual performing an actionactivates the same brain areas in the perceiver as those that are involved in the action.Neurons-referred to as mirror neurons–are thought to trigger in the observer of theaction in the same way as if he or she were performing the observed action. Accordingto grounded approaches to cognition, mental simulation of identical or similarenvironment and activities state is the cause of the alteration of the speed of theinternal clock, and result in the deviation of perceived duration from actual. So, thepurpose of this study is to investigate the role of embodiment in the perception of theduration of movement stimuli with the temporal bisection task.In experiment1, we used temporal bisection task, experiment stimuli includephotographs of an action contains implicit information about the depicted motion andphotographs without implied motion. We found that the average reaction time forthe discrimination of photographs with implied motion was longer than that forphotographs without implied motion, suggesting that the processing of impliedmotion involves longer and/or slower neural routes to compute time duration. Furtheranalyses suggest that this lengthening effect was mediated by an arousal effect oflimited duration on the speed of the internal clock system. The results revealed thatthe mental simulation of identical or similar environment and activities state is thecause of the alteration of the speed of the internal clock, and result in the deviation ofperceived duration from actual. In experiment2, participants were given the standardintroduction of the temporal bisection task. The aim of the present study was toinvestigate whether the perception of presentation durations of pictures of differentbody postures was distorted as function of the embodied movement that originallyproduced these postures. Participants were presented with two pictures, one with a low-arousal body posture judged to require no movement and the other with ahigh-arousal body posture judged to require considerable movement. Participantswere presented with two pictures, one with a low-arousal body posture judged torequire no movement and the other with a high-arousal body posture judged to requireconsiderable movement.The results of experiment1and experiment2revealed that the mental simulationof environment and activities state is the cause of the alteration of the speed of theinternal clock, and result in the deviation of perceived duration from actual.Consequently, Embodied Cognition have an effect on time perception. Experiment3added in the imitation condition of Experiment1on the basis of the experimental1.Result also revealed that participants overestimated the duration of movement wordsrelative to the without movement words. The result indicate that the embodiment ofthe movement that the motion words represent may be the main reason of thatparticipants overestimated the duration of motion words.In summary, these results indicate that the embodiment of the movementstimulus represent may be the main reason of that participants overestimated theduration. And this finding thus add to the mounting evidence suggesting thatembodiment plays an important, if not a central, role in Perceiving the time.