Changing Human Time Perception in Virtual Reality Emotional Priming

Literature tells us that human time perception mechanisms are sensitive to certain states and stimuli. Emotional stimuli, for example, lead to increased arousal which will likely lead to overestimations when participants are asked to estimate stimuli elapsed time. Because studies involving time perception are usually held in a laboratory setting and are not immersive, participants will be performing our time perception task in a virtual immersive environment with the help of a head-mounted virtual reality display. Lastly, it is not clear the effect of neuromodulation on time perception and specifically on the emotional bias in time perception. As such, we will be using transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to activate emotional-sensitive brain areas and explore its effects on time perception.

Overall, our goals are this:

• Determine whether VR emotional priming produces different results compared with non-VR priming;
• Determining whether VR priming affects time perception differently than non-VR priming;
• Determining whether tDCS neuromodulation can suppress the effects of emotional priming on time perception.