Schedule of Events | Symposia

The Effects of Physical Effort on Time Perception

Poster Session F - Tuesday, April 1, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Li Yang¹ (lyang147@ucr.edu), Rachel Francis¹, Rawan Gabr¹, Brynna Marich¹, Weiwei Zhang¹; ¹University of California, Riverside

The interaction between time perception and physical effort is essential in activities like sports. This study investigates how isometric handgrip tasks influence time perception through concurrent time reproduction and production tasks. In the time reproduction task, participants exerted grip force at varying intensities while experiencing a time interval (2–4 seconds) and reproduced the perceived duration. In the time production task, they produced a specified duration while exerting grip force. Two hypotheses were tested: the Arousal Hypothesis, suggesting that handgrip-induced physical arousal accelerates time perception, leading to overestimated durations in reproduction tasks and underestimated durations in production tasks; and the Competition Hypothesis, proposing that concurrent handgrip impairs time perception due to competition for shared attentional resources or magnitude-based processes, reversing these effects. Results supported the arousal hypothesis: High effort increased estimated durations in time reproduction tasks (Experiments 1–2) but decreased estimated durations in time production tasks (Experiment 4). Alternative explanations, such as response bias, were ruled out because the handgrip effect disappeared when durations were cued numerically rather than experienced under grip (Experiment 3). These findings suggest physical effort distorts perceived time, potentially due to arousal accelerating temporal processing.

Topic Area: PERCEPTION & ACTION: Other