Gaze of others warps time perception

Our perceptions of the passage of time can be distorted by our internal states — for example, when we're bored, time seems to pass more slowly. Now, a team in China reports a striking new finding in this field: if we see another person gazing at an object, and are then shown that object for a set period of time, our viewing seems shorter than it otherwise would. Or, as authors Yiwen Yu at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and colleagues put it, "Time flies faster when observers are confronted by objects that fell under others' gaze." 

In their new research, the team ran a series of screen-based studies involving a total of 70 adults and two types of object: cartoon faces, and also a simple series of black and white bars (known as a Gabor patch), which could be presented in various orientations. 

In the first experiment, participants were shown two cartoon faces in quick succession, both for different durations of time. On each trial, the participants were simply asked whether the first or second face had been there for longer. 

The participants then saw a photo of a female face with a neutral expression who initially looked straight ahead, but whose gaze then shifted to either the left or the right. Immediately afterwards, one of two cartoon faces appeared on the left or right of the screen. Importantly, one of the cartoon faces always appeared in the same direction as the eye gaze — this was the 'gazed-at' face — while the other always appeared on the opposite side of the screen, away from the female's line of sight. Finally, the initial stage of the study was repeated, with the participants indicating which of the two cartoon faces appeared on the screen for longer.

The team also ran some variations on this experiment, replacing the images of the female faces looking to the left or the right with arrows pointing to the left or the right, and replacing the cartoon faces with the simple Gabor patches. 

The results were consistent: if an object had been 'looked at' by the female face, it was subsequently perceived as being present for a shorter time than the other, non-'looked at' object. However, this time-compression effect completely disappeared when the gazing face was replaced with arrows — a non-social stimulus. It also vanished in an experiment in which the line of sight of the gazing face was blocked with barriers. 

In a final experiment, again using photos of faces looking in a particular direction, participants also completed a measure of their autistic traits. Autistic people don't respond to social cues in the same way as neurotypical people, and the researchers found that participants with lower scores on this measure were more susceptible to the time-compression effect. 

The precise mechanisms behind this effect are not clear. However, when someone else looks at an object, we tend to shift our attention to it, and also make some inferences about what the other person is thinking or intending in relation to said object. (We might think, even if not explicitly, that someone gazing at a chocolate bar would like to eat it, for example.) This means that gaze has, as the researchers write, "a unique power to influence how we perceive and process objects in the environment." Research also suggests that we process a gazed-at object more efficiently. If the participants did process a gazed-at object more efficiently, perhaps that affected their perceptions of how long it was present on the screen.  

Eye gaze is just one (albeit important) way that we signal our intentions to others. Though this study doesn't dive into other types of social signals, future research may be able to spot similar patterns in those, too. The precise reasons for the time-compression effect are yet to be fully explored, but these new findings do also support the idea that people react differently to cues from other people compared with different types of signal in the environment — and that social interactions affect our perceptions of time. 

Read the paper in full: https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797623119819