Dynamic affective stimulation modulates visual but not auditory prospective timing

Humans are highly accurate in their temporal judgements, yet their estimations could be susceptible to several biases. It is found that fear-evoking situations are associated with elevated orienting reaction, enabling more pulses to be registered and stored at the accumulator. However, the effect of state anxiety on time perception remains unresolved. Additionally, only a few studies to date have explored whether the influence of emotions on perceived time is modality dependent. To address these gaps, the current mixed-design aimed to explore the influence of anxiety-inducing real-life events on time perception across visual and auditory sensory modalities. Participants in each modality group completed three temporal bisection tasks in total, interspersed with two affective film clips (i.e., videos with elevated and reduced anxiety) in a random order. Although anxiety induction successfully increased participants' physiological arousal, a temporal lengthening effect was prominent after both types of manipulation across modalities, due to increased switch width in the visual group, as audition's advantage was immune to affective stimulation. The lengthening effect was accompanied by increased parasympathetic activation, pointing to the existence of two distinct attention-related mechanisms. As such, the temporal expansion we observed could constitute a contextually driven cognitive mechanism that facilitates individuals' homeostasis, while being modality dependent. Finally, our findings demonstrate the predictive value of physiological signals on altered timing.