Rapid temporal accumulation in spider fear: Evidence from hierarchical drift diffusion modelling

Area of Science:

• Cognitive psychology
• Neuroscience
• Psychiatry

Background:

• Fear can significantly alter an individual's perception of time, often making it seem to slow down or stop.
• Understanding the cognitive mechanisms underlying fear-induced time distortion is crucial for addressing emotional disorders.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether temporal accumulation speeds up during fear.
• To examine the impact of fear on time perception using advanced computational modeling.

Main Methods:

• Employed hierarchical drift diffusion modeling (HDDM) to analyze temporal judgment data.
• Utilized a temporal bisection task where participants (high and low fearful) judged durations of feared (spiders) and non-feared (birds) stimuli.
• Compared drift rates between fearful and non-feared stimuli in high and low fearful individuals.

Main Results:

• In highly fearful individuals, evidence accumulated more rapidly towards a long-duration decision for feared stimuli (spiders) compared to non-feared stimuli (birds).
• Drift rates, indicating the speed of evidence accumulation, were significantly higher for spiders than birds in the high fearful group.
• These findings were not apparent from traditional choice proportion analyses alone.

Conclusions:

• The results support the hypothesis that temporal accumulation speeds up during fear.
• Hierarchical drift diffusion modeling provides valuable insights into the process-based cognitive mechanisms of fear and time perception.
• This approach is useful for understanding disordered cognition in emotional disorders.