Summary: A recent study shows that the way we move alters our sense of time—not only because of physical exertion, but because motor control and cognitive demands draw on attention. Participants overestimated how long a stimulus lasted while running, walking backward, or performing a distracting mental task, compared with standing still.
Because walking backward and a concurrent mental task produced similar time distortions to running, the results point to divided attention and motor-control demands rather than elevated heart rate alone. The findings highlight how motor and cognitive processes interact to shape time perception in everyday situations.
Key Facts
- Cognitive demands matter: Distortions in perceived time during movement are driven largely by attention and motor-control load, not only by physiological stress from exercise.
- Similar effects across tasks: Walking backward and performing a visual working-memory task while standing produced the same overestimation of duration as running on a treadmill.
- Attention shapes time: Results support attentional models of timing in which shifting or dividing attention changes how long intervals are perceived.
Source: Neuroscience News (Communications)
When you run, time often feels stretched. New research indicates this stretching is driven less by your pounding heart and more by the brain’s effort to control movement and divide attention.
For many years, studies have shown that physical activity changes how people judge time. Cyclists, runners, and walkers tend to overestimate how long a stimulus lasts, as if an internal clock is altered when the body is in motion. The underlying cause—whether physiological arousal or cognitive load—has been debated.
The new study directly compared those possibilities. Instead of assuming exercise-induced arousal explains the bias, researchers designed experiments that separated cardiovascular changes from motor-cognitive demands. Their results indicate that the cognitive effort required to control complex movement, or to divide attention, plays a central role in stretching perceived duration.
Cognitive Load, Not Only Cardiovascular Load
Previous work from the same group showed people overestimate both visual and auditory stimulus durations while running on a treadmill. Crucially, the temporal bias vanished immediately when running stopped, even though heart rate and other physiological measures remained elevated. That pattern suggested the effect was tied to ongoing cognitive demands rather than to lingering bodily arousal.
To test this more rigorously, the study compared time perception across four conditions:
- Standing still (baseline)
- Running on a treadmill
- Walking backward (an attentionally demanding but physically less intense movement)
- Standing while performing a concurrent visual working-memory task (divided attention)
In every condition except baseline, participants overestimated stimulus durations by roughly 7–9%. The fact that walking backward and a divided-attention task at rest produced distortions similar to running strongly indicates that attentional and motor-control demands drive the effect.
How Motor Control Changes Time Perception
The findings fit a broad body of research showing that time perception depends heavily on attention. When cognitive resources are occupied—whether by answering a memory task or stabilizing posture while moving backward—the brain allocates fewer resources to tracking duration, and perceived time stretches.
This pattern is consistent with the attentional-gate model of timing, which proposes that attention regulates how pulses from an internal timing mechanism are accumulated. Dividing attention can alter the gate’s behavior, causing pulses to be counted differently and leading to overestimates of elapsed time.
Importantly, the distortion was observed across both sub-second and supra-second intervals, suggesting a general mechanism that affects time perception regardless of interval length rather than one limited to a specific timescale.
Implications for Neuroscience and Everyday Life
These results emphasize that perception is embodied: the brain continually integrates sensory input with motor control, and that integration influences basic perceptual judgments like duration. In real-world settings, any task that requires unusual or complex movement may bias our sense of how long events last.
The study cautions researchers and practitioners against attributing timing changes during movement solely to physiological factors such as fatigue, hormones, or cardiovascular arousal. Instead, attentional and cognitive demands associated with movement can be at least as influential.
What’s Next?
Future work should explore whether similar timing distortions occur with other types of movement and over longer timescales, and how moment-to-moment fluctuations in attention modulate these biases. Better understanding how cognitive resources are dynamically allocated during action could inform athletic training, ergonomics, and rehabilitation approaches for people with motor or attentional impairments.
Overall, this research reinforces the idea that the way we move shapes the way we perceive, including our sense of time.
About this neuroscience and time perception research news
Author: Neuroscience News Communications
Source: Neuroscience News Communications
Contact: Neuroscience News Communications – Neuroscience News
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
Original Research: Open access. “The role of physical and cognitive effort on time perception” by Giovanni Anobile et al., Scientific Reports (details available via the journal).
Abstract
The role of physical and cognitive effort on time perception
Action and perception are tightly linked, and time perception follows this pattern. Prior work reported that perceived duration of visual stimuli expands while running. This study tested whether that expansion stems from physiological changes caused by exertion (for example, increased heart rate, temperature, or arousal) or from cognitive demands related to motor control.
Researchers compared the timing bias induced by running with biases produced by two conditions that impose lower physical effort but consume cognitive resources: walking backward (an attentional motor task) and standing while performing a visual working-memory task. Both of these lower-effort conditions produced temporal overestimation virtually identical to running, suggesting that the modulation of temporal processing arises from cognitive effort required to perform and control specific motor routines.
These results are informative for scientists studying time perception in natural sensorimotor contexts and underscore the importance of accounting for cognitive factors linked to motor execution when interpreting timing effects observed during physical activity.