RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Engaging narratives evoke similar neural activity and lead to similar time perception
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 104778
DO 10.1101/104778
A1 Samantha Cohen
A1 Simon Henin
A1 Lucas C. Parra
YR 2017
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/01/31/104778.abstract
AB It is said that we lose track of time - that “time flies” - when we are engrossed in a story. How does engagement with the story cause this distorted perception of time, and what are its neural correlates? People commit both time and attentional resources to an engaging stimulus. For narrative videos, attentional engagement can be represented as the level of similarity between the electroencephalographic responses of different viewers. Here we show that this measure of neural engagement predicted the duration of time that viewers were willing to commit to narrative videos. Contrary to popular wisdom, engagement did not distort the average perception of time duration. Rather, more similar brain responses resulted in a more uniform perception of time across viewers. These findings suggest that by capturing the attention of an audience, narrative videos bring both neural processing and the subjective perception of time into synchrony.