RESUMO
Social distancing in response to the COVID-19 pandemic brought several modifications in our daily lives. With these changes, some people have reported alterations in their feelings of how fast time was passing. In this study, we assessed whether and how social distancing and the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic influenced participants' time awareness and production of time intervals. Participants (n = 3855) filled in the first questionnaire approximately 60 days after the start of social distancing in Brazil and weekly questionnaires for 15 weeks during social distancing. Our results indicate that time was perceived as expanded at the beginning, but this feeling decreased across the weeks. Time awareness was strongly associated with psychological factors such as loneliness, stress, and positive emotions, but not with time production. This relation was shown between participants and within their longitudinal reports. Together, our findings show how emotions are a crucial aspect of how time is felt.
RESUMO
Being able to anticipate events before they happen facilitates stimulus processing. The anticipation of the contents of events is thought to be implemented by the elicitation of prestimulus templates in sensory cortex. In contrast, the anticipation of the timing of events is typically associated with entrainment of neural oscillations. It is so far unknown whether and in which conditions temporal expectations interact with feature-based expectations, and, consequently, whether entrainment modulates the generation of content-specific sensory templates. In this study, we investigated the role of temporal expectations in a sensory discrimination task. We presented participants with rhythmically interleaved visual and auditory streams of relevant and irrelevant stimuli while measuring neural activity using magnetoencephalography. We found no evidence that rhythmic stimulation induced prestimulus feature templates. However, we did observe clear anticipatory rhythmic preactivation of the relevant sensory cortices. This oscillatory activity peaked at behaviourally relevant, in-phase, intervals. Our results suggest that temporal expectations about stimulus features do not behave similarly to explicitly cued, nonrhythmic, expectations, yet elicit a distinct form of modality-specific preactivation.