Can your body orientation affect your sense of time?

Time perception is an important human skill that allows us to coordinate our actions and predict unfolding events. Accurate perception of time is especially important for tasks that require precise physical actions in response to complex events. Researchers are interested in understanding situations that alter the perception of time, including spaceflight. Research has shown that the changes in weightlessness and microgravity experienced by astronauts systematically affect their perception of time. After several hours of flight, astronauts showed more variability in their estimates for short periods of time (e.g., 1- and 2-second periods) and a greater tendency to overestimate time ( For example, a 1 second period that generates a 1.5 second period when asked to generate it).

Many questions remain about how and why changes in microgravity affect time perception, but the mechanism may be related to how microgravity changes interactionor the awareness of our internal physical sensations. According to prominent theories of time perception, we rely on internal physical sensations (such as heartbeat and breathing) to keep track of time.

Simulate microgravity with head-down tilt

Now, researchers may be able to address questions about how microgravity affects time without sending participants into space. it’s simply that are lying As shown in the image below, being down for a while in a head-down tilt (HDT) can cause similar physiological and vestibular changes associated with microgravity.

New research published in this issue sensing We investigated whether simple changes in body posture can cause similar disruptions to our sense of time as experiencing microgravity. In this study, Dr. Weicong Ren and co-authors investigated whether exposing participants to a 30-minute head-down tilt affects observers’ judgments of time, similar to what was shown in astronauts. I asked.

Participants (16 students from Hebei Normal University) completed time breeding task There, they first saw a blue square at different times (0.8 seconds, 1 second, or 2 seconds). Then the blue square disappeared and after a short delay a gray square appeared on the screen. Participants were instructed to press a button to indicate that a gray square was on screen for the same amount of time as the previous blue square. Performance during this time was measured in three ways on the reproduction task. Absolute error measurement. relative proportion measurements; and the coefficient of variation (or coefficient of inconsistent response from test to test). Critically, participants completed the task twice before the head-down incline intervention and once after lying 30 minutes after the 30-min head-down incline.

As the researchers predicted, performance on the breeding task was altered by the head-down tilt manipulation. Participants tended to make larger errors after the head-down tilt maneuver than before. Furthermore, participants were more likely to overrated A shorter period after a head-down tilt maneuver than before. These results are consistent with previous findings with astronauts and support the concept that body tilt can also lead to a perception of time similar to experiencing microgravity.

The results of this study suggest that researchers can continue to ask questions about microgravity without the costs and challenges associated with spaceflight research. For example, researchers can treat whether Changes in time perception associated with being in a virtual environment De-compensated during head-down tilt. Such research not only addresses questions about microgravity that are relevant to pilots and astronauts, but also sheds light on how different mechanisms of time perception interact.