Gaze-Triggered Communicative Intention Compresses Perceived Temporal Duration
研究发现，他人注视过的物体在时间感知上会被认为更短，这种效应与自闭症特质相关，且依赖于注视者的意图处理，表明存在一种专门的社会线索机制来塑造时间感知。
Eye gaze communicates a person’s attentional state and intentions toward objects. Here we demonstrate that this important social signal has the potential to distort time perception of gazed-at objects ( N = 70 adults). By using a novel gaze-associated learning paradigm combined with the time-discrimination task, we showed that objects previously associated with others’ eye gaze were perceived as significantly shorter in duration than the nonassociated counterparts. The time-compression effect cannot be attributed to general attention allocation because it disappeared when objects were associated with nonsocial attention cues (i.e., arrows). Critically, this effect correlated with observers’ autistic traits and vanished when the gazing agent’s line of sight was blocked by barriers, reflecting the key role of intention processing triggered by gaze in modulating time perception. Our findings support the existence of a special mechanism tuned to social cues, which can shape our perception of the outer world in time domains.