Affiliation:
1. State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Science, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences
2. Department of Psychology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences
3. Chinese Institute for Brain Research
Abstract
Eye gaze communicates a person’s attentional state and intentions toward objects. Here we demonstrate that this important social signal has the potential to distort time perception of gazed-at objects ( N = 70 adults). By using a novel gaze-associated learning paradigm combined with the time-discrimination task, we showed that objects previously associated with others’ eye gaze were perceived as significantly shorter in duration than the nonassociated counterparts. The time-compression effect cannot be attributed to general attention allocation because it disappeared when objects were associated with nonsocial attention cues (i.e., arrows). Critically, this effect correlated with observers’ autistic traits and vanished when the gazing agent’s line of sight was blocked by barriers, reflecting the key role of intention processing triggered by gaze in modulating time perception. Our findings support the existence of a special mechanism tuned to social cues, which can shape our perception of the outer world in time domains.
Funder
national natural science foundation of china
the Strategic Priority Research Program
the STI2030-Major Projects
the Interdisciplinary Innovation Team
institute of psychology, chinese academy of sciences
fundamental research funds for the central universities