11.2022 - 02.2026

Study of the impact of emotions on temporal prediction

It is well known that the sense of time in humans is a highly flexible system that allows adaptive responses to the environment. Our perception of elapsed time is not always the same; in fact emotional situations distort its representation. The phrase “time passes quickly when having fun” well represents the impact of emotional factors in temporal perception. This dynamic modulation of temporal perception makes this ability crucial for social interaction. To date, it has not been studied whether emotions also influence the ability to predict time. In fact, humans use temporal information to model behavior by extracting the temporal regularities of an event to predict its future temporal properties. This ability is dynamically modulated by contextual features, for example, different predictive contexts: rhythmic (as in the case of music) or memory-based (as in the case of the ability to predict, based on experience, the transition from red to green light). The project aims to develop an ad hoc protocol to study the effect of emotional stimuli (facial expressions from the Facial Action Coding System, FACS database) on temporal prediction. Different predictive contexts will be considered to assess the emotion-predictive contexts interaction.

Project objective

Development of an ad hoc task to evaluate how emotions influence time prediction skills in healthy subjects and patients suffering from neurological diseases. 

• Neuroscience (study of the impact of emotions in temporal prediction)

• Neurology (understanding the pathophysiological mechanisms of dystonia and Parkinson's disease ) 

Settori Scientifico Disciplinari

BIO/09  PHYSIOLOGY

Spoke 4 : Perception and Brain-Body Interaction

Link al Sito