Cognitive and Emotional Mechanisms of Time Perception

Even though time is embedded in many aspects of our life, it remains one of the most elusive problems in psychological research. We cannot approach time as other dimensions like sight, sound or touch, as there are no specific “temporal stimuli” or specific receptors dedicated to temporal processing. Time perception is not an objective and accurate perception of the passing time, but a highly subjective ability, which depends on the environmental background, such as emotion, attention, motivation, etc. Some achievements have been made in the study of the cognitive mechanism of time perception, such as the pacemaker-accumulator by Treisman, the striatal beat frequency model by Meck, the resource allocation model by Zakay, etc. Meanwhile, in the field of emotion and time perception, researchers have explored various influence factors of time perception, such as valence, arousal and motivation. However, the specific mechanisms of emotion regulating time perception are still unclear, and there is also lack of relevant neural evidence regarding the mechanisms. Therefore, how these factors affect time perception and which stage of time perception is affected need to be further explored.

This Research Topic aims to prompt scholars to contribute to the advancement of knowledge about time perception. We would encourage studies that adopt the ERP, fMRI, TMS and other technologies to explore the cognitive neural mechanisms of time perception. We also aim to explore the influence factors of time perception, especially emotion, so as to improve and expand the cognitive model of emotion regulating time perception. In addition, we also encourage researchers to explore the characteristics of time perception among special groups, such as depression and autism populations.

Concerning the types of manuscripts, with the exception of theoretical/opinion papers and narrative literature reviews, all types of papers and study designs with clinical or community samples are acceptable (e.g., experimental, correlational, cross-sectional, longitudinal research, and meta-analysis, etc.). Psychometric papers concerning the development of new measures or the validation of existing scales are also acceptable as they are critical for further development of research in this field.