The mind's clock in sport: a narrative review of temporal processing across athletic disciplines

Time perception is a fundamental yet often underappreciated component of athletic performance. Athletes across various disciplines must continuously process temporal information to coordinate movements, anticipate events, and make effective decisions under pressure. This narrative review synthesizes current knowledge on temporal processing in sports without applying rigid methodological protocols, aiming to identify key patterns and sport-specific mechanisms. A literature search was conducted in PubMed and ScienceDirect for articles published between 2005 and 2025 using keywords related to time perception, sport types, and specific athletic disciplines. Thirty two studies met the inclusion criteria and were analyzed in detail. The reviewed paradigms included duration estimation, production, reproduction, discrimination, motor timing, representational momentum, temporal resolution and time-to-collision tasks. Two main findings emerge. First, distinct processing mechanisms for sub- and suprasecond intervals are consistently observed across paradigms and sport types: subsecond intervals tend to be overestimated/dilated, whereas suprasecond intervals are underestimated/shrunken. This pattern may reflect an adaptive strategy: temporal dilation of brief, critical events may preserve additional time for decision-making, although this mechanism appears limited to subsecond ranges. In contrast, compression of longer intervals may be more advantageous in extended play. Second, athletic experience modulates these effects. Engagement in sport is associated with enhanced suprasecond underestimation and subsecond dilation, particularly in high-stakes contexts where athletes frequently report subjective time slowing. These changes are sport-specific and often correlate with years of training. Physical exertion, fatigue, and emotional arousal systematically modulate temporal judgments, while accumulated expertise-rather than innate ability-appears to refine temporal processing through practice. These findings highlight time perception as a trainable, context-sensitive component of athletic expertise. Understanding how athletes perceive and utilize temporal information has implications for talent identification, training design, and performance optimization across sport disciplines.