Duration perception of emotional stimuli: Using evaluative conditioning to avoid sensory confounds

Abstract

It has been found that emotional pictures are estimated to last longer than neutral ones. However, emotional and neutral stimuli often differ in their physical characteristics, too. Since this might also affect time perception, we present a method disentangling a possible confounding regarding the processing of physically different stimulus material. In the evaluative condition paradigm, participants, at first, learnt the association of neutral images with a certain Landolt ring and of emotional images with another Landolt ring with a different gap position. The conditioned Landolt rings were subsequently used in a temporal bisection task. In two experiments, the results revealed a temporal overestimation of Landolt rings conditioned with emotional pictures compared to neutral pictures showing that the temporal overestimation of emotional stimuli cannot be attributed to perceptual differences between neutral and emotional stimuli. The method provides the potential for investigating emotional effects on various perceptual processes.

Keywords:

• Time perception
• Duration estimation
• Emotional stimuli
• Evaluative conditioning

We thank Jelena Gerke for her assistance in data collection.

This work was partially supported by Transregional Collaborative Research Centre SFB/TRR 62 Companion-Technology for Cognitive Technical Systems funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).

We thank Jelena Gerke for her assistance in data collection.

This work was partially supported by Transregional Collaborative Research Centre SFB/TRR 62 Companion-Technology for Cognitive Technical Systems funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).