Altered temporal awareness during Covid-19 pandemic.

Social isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic had profound effects on human well-being. A handful of studies have focused on how time perception was altered during the COVID-19 pandemic, while no study has tested whether temporal metacognition is also affected by the lockdown. We examined the impact of long-term social isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic on the ability to monitor errors in timing performance. We recruited 1232 participants from 12 countries during lockdown, 211 of which were retested "post-pandemic" for within-group comparisons. We also tested a new group of 331 participants during the "post-pandemic" period and compared their data to those of 1232 participants tested during the lockdown (between-group comparison). Participants produced a 3600 ms target interval and assessed the magnitude and direction of their time production error. Both within and between-group comparisons showed reduced metric error monitoring performance during the lockdown, even after controlling for government-imposed stringency indices. A higher level of reported social isolation also predicted reduced temporal error monitoring ability. Participants produced longer duration during lockdown compared to post-lockdown (again controlling for government stringency indices). We reason that these effects may be underlain by altered biological and behavioral rhythms during social isolation experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic. Understanding these effects is crucial for a more complete characterization of the cognitive consequences of long-term social isolation.

The Blursday database as a resource to study subjective temporalities during COVID-19.

The COVID-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns triggered worldwide changes in the daily routines of human experience. The Blursday database provides repeated measures of subjective time and related processes from participants in nine countries tested on 14 questionnaires and 15 behavioural tasks during the COVID-19 pandemic. A total of 2,840 participants completed at least one task, and 439 participants completed all tasks in the first session. The database and all data collection tools are accessible to researchers for studying the effects of social isolation on temporal information processing, time perspective, decision-making, sleep, metacognition, attention, memory, self-perception and mindfulness. Blursday includes quantitative statistics such as sleep patterns, personality traits, psychological well-being and lockdown indices. The database provides quantitative insights on the effects of lockdown (stringency and mobility) and subjective confinement on time perception (duration, passage of time and temporal distances). Perceived isolation affects time perception, and we report an inter-individual central tendency effect in retrospective duration estimation.