Year: 2017
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Time is a fundamental dimension of our perception of the world and therefore of critical importance to the organisation of human behaviour.Without the ability to perceive time we would not be able to navigate the world in an effective way.We would not be able to perceive the causality between events, nor would we be able to account for the future.However, despite its significance, our perception of time is not veridical, and appears to be labile to many external and internal factors.(A pertinent example is the apothegm "time flies when you're having fun", which reflects the temporal distortions we often experience during rewarding periods.)This thesis was aimed at characterising a novel source of volatility in time perception -the effect of reward consumption -and to assess the implications of non-veridical time perception for human decision making.The first study sought to characterise the effect of different primary rewards on interval timing.Participants performed a novel variant of a duration production paradigm, while they received different volumes of fruit juice on a trial-by-trial basis.The consumption of fruit juice lead to systematic overproductions of time (from 2-5 seconds) and this effect scaled with the volume of the consumed juice.Another four reward types were subsequently tested: money (a secondary reward), water (a tasteless, noncaloric reward), aspartame (a sweet, noncaloric reward), and maltodextrin (a tasteless, caloric reward).Maltodextrin also produced a similar effect on time productions.This pattern of results suggested that the observed effect was Declaration and acknowledgements I, Bowen J
Author: Bowen J. Fung
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2765521302