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Electrophysiological Evidence for an Accumulation Process in the Timing of Emotional Stimuli

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Multidisciplinary Aspects of Time and Time Perception

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 6789))

Abstract

Emotion and time perception are in constant interaction in everyday life activities. While growing literature explored the mechanisms underlying emotional timing, the neural correlates remain unknown. The present experiment explored evoked-related potentials associated to the estimation of emotional sounds duration and to its modulation by attention. Electroencephalographic activity and skin conductance response were recorded during a time estimation task, in which participants were instructed to attend either to time or to emotion. Attending to emotion increased autonomic arousal and lengthened subjective duration of stimuli. Conversely, focusing attention away from emotion decreased physiological arousal and shortened time estimates. ERP results showed that subjective time dilation was associated to enhanced amplitude of the Contingent Negative Variation - a slow negative wave involved in time processing. This result supports models of time perception assuming that subjective time is based on an accumulation process in the brain.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Geneva, bl du Pont d’Arve 40, 1211, Geneva, Switzerland

    Nathalie Mella

  2. Unit of Cognitive Neurosciences and Cerebral Imaging, CNRS, Paris, France

    Nathalie Mella & Viviane Pouthas

Authors
  1. Nathalie Mella
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  2. Viviane Pouthas
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Cognitive Systems Research Institute, Fthiotidos 16, 11523, Athens, Greece

    Argiro Vatakis

  2. Dept. of Psychology and IIASS, International Institute for Advanced Scientific Studies, Second University of Naples, Vietri sul Mare, SA, Italy

    Anna Esposito

  3. Institute for Language and Speech Processing, Athens, Greece

    Maria Giagkou

  4. UCD School of Computer Science and Informatics, University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland

    Fred Cummins

  5. Department of Music Studies, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, University Campus, 54124, Thessaloniki, Greece

    Georgios Papadelis

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Mella, N., Pouthas, V. (2011). Electrophysiological Evidence for an Accumulation Process in the Timing of Emotional Stimuli. In: Vatakis, A., Esposito, A., Giagkou, M., Cummins, F., Papadelis, G. (eds) Multidisciplinary Aspects of Time and Time Perception. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 6789. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21478-3_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21478-3_14

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-21477-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-21478-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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