How Action Shapes Temporal Judgments: A Study in Brain Damaged Patients Through Immersive Virtual Reality

TL;DR

This study shows that brain-damaged patients, especially those with right hemisphere damage, struggle with time perception in abstract tasks but perform better in realistic virtual environments.

Contribution

The study introduces immersive VR as a novel method to assess time perception in brain-damaged patients, revealing context-dependent temporal processing.

Findings

Right brain damaged patients underestimated time intervals in abstract tasks but showed reduced impairment in VR-based actions.

Voxel-lesion-symptom mapping identified brain regions linked to time perception.

Meaningful actions in realistic contexts improve temporal judgment in brain-damaged patients.

Abstract

Background/Objectives: Time processing is crucial for managing several aspects of our daily experiences: the continuous interaction with a changing environment requires individuals to make precise temporal judgments. Following right hemisphere damage, patients exhibited a significant alteration in perceiving temporal duration. However, this impairment usually emerges with “abstract” computerized tasks, not in everyday contexts. This study investigates estimation and reproduction of time intervals in left (LBD) and right brain damaged (RBD) patients compared to healthy controls. Methods: We adopt computerized tasks (Experiment 1) and novel virtual reality (VR) tasks where participants judged the duration of their own actions framed within a realistic VR context (Experiment 2). Results: RBD but not LBD patients underestimated time intervals, and reproduced time intervals as longer than they are. Crucially, when participants judged the temporal duration of meaningful actions performed in a realistic context through the VR scenarios, the impairment in processing time observed in RBD patients was reduced. The Voxel-lesion-symptom-mapping (VLSM) analysis revealed the neurocognitive basis of time perception. Conclusions: Our results show that meaningful actions within familiar contexts can provide a channel of information that is essential for optimal time processing, suggesting the importance of assessing time processing in an ecologically controlled manner using VR.

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