Our perception of time varies with the degree of cognitive engagement in tasks. The perceived passage of time accelerates while working on demanding tasks, whereas time appears to drag during boring situations. Our experiment aimed at investigating whether this relationship is mutual: Can manipulated announcements of elapsed time systematically affect the attentional resources applied to a cognitive task? We measured behavioral performance and the EEG in a whole report working memory paradigm with six items of different colors that each had to be reported after a short delay period. The 32 participants were informed about the current time after each 20 trials, while the clock was running at either 100% (normal), 120% (fast), or 80% (slow) of normal clock speed depending on the experimental block. The mean number of correctly reported colors per trial was significantly increased in the fast as compared to the slow and normal clock conditions. In the EEG, we focused on neural oscillations during working memory encoding and storage. As an electrophysiological correlate of task engagement, frontal theta power during the storage interval was increased in the fast clock condition. Also, the power of frontal theta oscillations predicted the number of correctly reported colors on a single-trial basis. This shows that a covert manipulation of clock speed can lead to an improvement in cognitive performance, presumably mediated by a higher allocation of attentional resources resulting from an adaptation of the subjective passage of time during an experiment.

中文翻译：

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使用加速时钟提高工作内存

我们对时间的感知随着对任务的认知参与程度而变化。在处理要求苛刻的任务时，感知到的时间流逝会加速，而在无聊的情况下，时间似乎会拖延。我们的实验旨在调查这种关系是否是相互的：经过时间的操纵公告能否系统地影响应用于认知任务的注意力资源？我们在整个报告工作记忆范式中测量了行为表现和脑电图，其中有六个不同颜色的项目，每个项目都必须在短暂的延迟期后报告。每 20 次试验后，32 名参与者被告知当前时间，而时钟则以正常时钟速度的 100%（正常）、120%（快）或 80%（慢）运行，具体取决于实验块。与慢速和正常时钟条件相比，每次试验正确报告颜色的平均数量在快速时显着增加。在脑电图中，我们专注于工作记忆编码和存储过程中的神经振荡。作为任务参与的电生理关联，在快速时钟条件下，存储间隔期间的额叶θ功率增加。此外，额叶 theta 振荡的功率在单次试验的基础上预测了正确报告的颜色数量。这表明，对时钟速度的秘密操纵可以导致认知能力的提高，这可能是由于在实验过程中对主观时间流逝的适应导致注意力资源的更高分配所介导的。