Summary: A new study shows that the way we move our bodies can warp our sense of time — not just because of physical exertion, but because of the cognitive demands of motor control. Researchers found that participants overestimated stimulus durations while running, walking backward, or performing a distracting mental task, compared to standing still.
The fact that walking backward and mental distraction produced similar distortions to running suggests that divided attention, not just elevated heart rate, drives the effect. These findings highlight how motor and cognitive processes interact to shape time perception in real-world settings.
Key Facts
- Cognitive Demands Matter: Time perception distortions during running are driven by attention and motor control demands, not just physiological stress.
- Similar Effects Across Tasks: Walking backward and doing a mental task at rest produced the same overestimation of time as running.
- Attention Shapes Time: Findings support the attentional gate model, where dividing attention alters perceived duration.
Source: Neuroscience News
When you’re running, time seems to stretch. But why? New research suggests it’s not simply because your heart is pounding — it’s because your brain is busy controlling your body.
For decades, scientists have documented how physical activity alters how we perceive time.
People cycling, running, or even walking often overestimate how long a stimulus lasts, as though the clock in their minds runs slower when their bodies move faster. Yet the underlying reason for this effect has remained elusive.
Is it because of the physiological stress of exercise — increased heart rate, hormones, and body temperature? Or is it because the brain is devoting resources to controlling complex movements, leaving fewer resources for tracking time accurately?
A new study tackles this question head-on. Using a clever experimental design, researchers showed that the time distortion people experience while running is not primarily due to physiological changes, but instead to cognitive demands of motor control.
Cognitive Load, Not Just Cardiovascular Load
In earlier work, the same team had shown that people overestimate the duration of both visual and auditory stimuli while running on a treadmill. Interestingly, the bias disappeared as soon as the running stopped — even though heart rate and other bodily indicators remained elevated. This observation hinted that the effect might not come from purely physiological changes.
To test this hypothesis more rigorously, the researchers compared time perception in four conditions:
- Standing still (baseline)
- Running on a treadmill
- Walking backwards (a cognitively demanding but less physically intense task)
- Standing still while doing a concurrent visual working memory task
In all conditions except the baseline, participants consistently overestimated stimulus durations by around 7–9%. The fact that walking backwards and dividing attention at rest produced similar distortions to running strongly suggests that cognitive control demands — not just physical effort — are driving the effect.
Why Does Motor Control Affect Time?
The findings align with decades of research showing that time perception depends heavily on attention. When your cognitive resources are tied up with something else — whether it’s solving a mental puzzle or keeping your balance while moving backward — your brain allocates fewer resources to tracking time.
This fits well with the “attentional gate” model of timing, which proposes that attention acts like a gate letting pulses from an internal clock accumulate. When attention is divided, the gate may open wider or pulse more irregularly, leading to overestimations of duration.
Even more intriguingly, this distortion happened across both sub-second and supra-second intervals, suggesting that the effect taps into a general mechanism of time perception, regardless of the scale of the interval.
A Broader Lesson for Neuroscience
These results matter beyond treadmill experiments. They remind us that perception is profoundly embodied — the brain does not passively record time or space but constantly integrates sensory input with motor control. In ecological, real-world settings, any task requiring unusual or complex movements may bias our perception of time.
Researchers also caution against assuming that timing distortions observed during physical activities reflect only physiological factors like fatigue or hormonal changes. Their data clearly show that attentional and cognitive demands are at least as important.
What’s Next?
The authors note that future research should investigate whether these effects generalize to other kinds of movement and to longer durations, as well as how attentional fluctuations over time modulate the bias.
Understanding the dynamic allocation of cognitive resources could have implications for everything from athletic training to rehabilitation for patients with motor or attention deficits.
In sum, this work reinforces the idea that how we move shapes how we perceive — even the passage of time itself.
About this neuroscience and time perception research news
Author: Neuroscience News Communications
Source: Neuroscience News
Contact: Neuroscience News Communications – Neuroscience News
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
Original Research: Open access.
“The role of physical and cognitive effort on time perception” by Giovanni Anobile et al. Scientific Reports
Abstract
The role of physical and cognitive effort on time perception
Action and perception are intertwined, and time perception is not an exception to this general principle. In line with that, we have recently reported that the perceived duration of visual stimuli is extended while running.
Here we tested the nature of this phenomenon by contrasting two possibilities: one related to physiological changes induced by physical effort (e.g. heart rate, temperature, arousal), and one related to cognitive alterations linked to motor control.
To this aim we compared the direction and magnitude of the temporal bias induced by running to that prompted by other two conditions requiring much lower physical effort but both depleting cognitive resources.
In these two conditions, participants either performed the timing task while walking backwards (an attentional motor task) or standing still with cognitive resources divided in a concurrent visual-working memory task.
Both conditions yielded temporal overestimations virtually identical to that found while running, suggesting that physical activity could modulate temporal processing through the cognitive effort required to perform/control that specific motor routine.
The results are informative for the scientific community investigating time perception in ecological sensorimotor contexts, suggesting the importance of considering the potential confounding role of cognitive factors related to motor execution.
