COVID-19 and temporal perception: prolonged short-term time perception in a post-pandemic world

The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly restructured daily life, significantly impacting mental health. This negative event has been reported to alter subjective experience of time, such as the blending of days, reflecting distortions in long-term time perception over relatively coarse scales. However, the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on short-term time perception over fine scales has received much less attention. Here we delve into this underexplored territory, demonstrating that the pandemic, as a high-arousal negative event, lengthens our perception of short time intervals. Using a two-session duration discrimination paradigm, we showed that COVID-19 related images were perceived as significantly longer than neutral pictures of the same duration. Unlike emotion-induced temporal distortions, this dilation was consistent across sessions, correlated with heightened arousal, remained unaffected by anxiety, and exhibited a long-lasting effect - persisting even four years after the initial outbreak. Taken together, our findings highlight a temporal dilation induced by COVID-19 stimuli, extending our understanding of how high-arousal negative events interact with cognitive processes, particularly time perception.