The Effects of Energy on Time Perception

In this project we investigate the effects of energy consumption on time perception. Specifically we examined how the use of energy can affect a person’s ability to accurately judge a given interval of time. We hypothesize that the more difficult the task is, and the more energy required to carry out that task, the more inaccurate people’s judgements of time are going to be. We looked at two “forms” of energy consumption; 1) Physical energy, or the energy required to carry out a specific motor task, and 2) Mental energy, the energy required to maintain complex cognitive functions. In the current study, we asked participants to accurately monitor the passage of time while simultaneously performing physical and mental tasks. For the physical task we used a gentle but sustained isometric motor task (seated leg extension). For the cognitive task we used a phoneme monitoring task, where participants listened to words and pressed a button any time a probe phoneme was present. We examined how well participants were able to monitor the passage of time while participants engaged in these tasks. Results will be described in terms of how well the results confirm the Attentional Gate Theory, which says that when we monitor the flow of time, an “internal pacemaker” sends pulses to a “gate”, which accumulates said pulses, and uses the total number to interpret the temporal interval (Bangert, Kurby & Zacks, 2018). When someone’s attention is diverted from the temporal interval, it is said that the gate shrinks, and that person is unable to interpret all the pulses and their ability to accurately judge the given time interval diminishes. We want to know if it’s truly the action of paying attention that causes this misjudgment, or if it could be caused by the consumption of energy needed to carry out a task.