Time experience during social distancing: A longitudinal study during the first months of COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil.

Social distancing in response to the COVID-19 pandemic brought several modifications in our daily lives. With these changes, some people have reported alterations in their feelings of how fast time was passing. In this study, we assessed whether and how social distancing and the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic influenced participants' time awareness and production of time intervals. Participants (n = 3855) filled in the first questionnaire approximately 60 days after the start of social distancing in Brazil and weekly questionnaires for 15 weeks during social distancing. Our results indicate that time was perceived as expanded at the beginning, but this feeling decreased across the weeks. Time awareness was strongly associated with psychological factors such as loneliness, stress, and positive emotions, but not with time production. This relation was shown between participants and within their longitudinal reports. Together, our findings show how emotions are a crucial aspect of how time is felt.

Post-interval EEG activity is related to task-goals in temporal discrimination.

Studies investigating the neural mechanisms of time perception often measure brain activity while participants perform a temporal task. However, several of these studies are based exclusively on tasks in which time is relevant, making it hard to dissociate activity related to decisions about time from other task-related patterns. In the present study, human participants performed a temporal or color discrimination task of visual stimuli. Participants were informed which magnitude they would have to judge before or after presenting the two stimuli (S1 and S2) in different blocks. Our behavioral results showed, as expected, that performance was better when participants knew beforehand which magnitude they would judge. Electrophysiological data (EEG) was analysed using Linear Discriminant Contrasts (LDC) and a Representational Similarity Analysis (RSA) approach to investigate whether and when information about time and color was encoded. During the presentation of S1, we did not find consistent differences in EEG activity as a function of the task. On the other hand, during S2, we found that temporal and color information was encoded in a task-relevant manner. Taken together, our results suggest that task goals strongly modulate decision-related information in EEG activity.

Dynamic representation of time in brain states.

The ability to process time on the scale of milliseconds and seconds is essential for behaviour. A growing number of studies have started to focus on brain dynamics as a mechanism for temporal encoding. Although there is growing evidence in favour of this view from computational and in vitro studies, there is still a lack of results from experiments in humans. We show that high-dimensional brain states revealed by multivariate pattern analysis of human EEG are correlated to temporal judgements. First, we show that, as participants estimate temporal intervals, the spatiotemporal dynamics of their brain activity are consistent across trials. Second, we present evidence that these dynamics exhibit properties of temporal perception, such as scale invariance. Lastly, we show that it is possible to predict temporal judgements based on brain states. These results show how scalp recordings can reveal the spatiotemporal dynamics of human brain activity related to temporal processing.