Presentation Information
[O5-04]A Methodology to Accelerate Our Information Processing Toward Revealing the Relation between Process Speed and Time Perception
*Oki Hasegawa1, Shohei Hidaka1 (1. Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (Japan))
Keywords:
Flow State,Infomation Processing Speed
The subjective experience of time slowing down during peak performance, or 'flow', suggests a link between cognitive processing speed and time perception. However, this relationship is not well understood due to the limitations of short-duration tasks, which are typically employed in psychological and neurological laboratory studies. This is a critical limitation, as the phenomena of interest typically emerge during continuous, sustained activities in the real world. Therefore, to properly test our central hypothesis—an extension of Treisman’s internal clock model which posits that a high-arousal state accelerates an internal pacemaker to simultaneously improve information processing speed and extend subjective time —an experimental paradigm capable of inducing and continuously sustaining such a state is first necessary. Here, we present this paradigm, which involves an adaptive Tetris game designed to induce a flow-like state and enable a continuous study of the aforementioned link. The system uses a Markov process model to estimate players' abilities and adjust the task's difficulty in real time. To validate this approach, we first measured baseline performance in an ideal, untimed version of the task, confirming that player performance fell within the range predicted by our model. We then investigated the effect of three patterns of difficulty change — linear increase, linear decrease and random — on processing speed (lines cleared per minute). Although players achieved a similar maximum performance level at the end of the game in all conditions, performance improved most quickly under the linearly increasing difficulty condition. These results demonstrate that an adaptive challenge that continuously and predictably increases in response to a player's ability is a key factor for accelerating cognitive processing. At this conference, we will report on the preliminary performance evaluation of the developed task system.