Interoceptive and exteroceptive influences on temporal and affective experience
Alterations in feeling and malleability of subjective time are two highly related ingredients of human conscious experience. An increasing body of evidence suggests that these constructs are interwoven with perceptual processing and internal bodily signals, rather than being governed by domain-general neural mechanisms. Here, in a series of four papers we delved deeper into the link between time and affect, and their association with perceptual and interoceptive processes. In the first paper, in a virtual reality experiment, participants perceived the duration of more crowded subway trips as longer and this effect was mediated by negative feelings induced by crowding. These results confirmed that subjective alterations of time and feeling are highly related to each other. In the second paper, we further explored how the malleability of subjective time interacts with changes in heart rate. Participants judged the duration of sub second tones, while their cardiac signals were being recorded. Results revealed that changes in heart rate within an individual were highly interrelated with the changes in perception of duration. In the third paper, we turned towards subjective feelings evoked by visual stimuli, probing their potential origins in the visual system. In a series of computational, behavioral and fMRI experiments we showed that affective valence may directly originate from low-level perceptual processing distinct from higher level conceptual analysis. Finally, in the fourth paper, we investigated whether these visually evoked feelings, as well as internal mood, are associated with subsecond time perception. Results revealed that intensity and negativity of mood as well as visually evoked arousal influenced changes in subjective time. This collection of papers offers fresh insights into the interconnectedness of subjective time perception and emotion, interwoven with internal physiological changes and sensory experiences.