Time is Confidence: Monetary Incentives Metacognitive Profile on Duration Judgment

The question we addressed in the current study is whether the mere prospect of monetary reward affects subjective time perception. To test this question, we collected trail-based confidence reports in a task in which subjects made categorical decisions about probe durations relative to the reference duration. When there was a potential to gain monetary reward, the duration was perceived to be longer than in the neutral condition, and confidence, which reflects the perceived probability of being correct, was higher in the reward condition than in the neutral condition. We found that confidence influences the sense of time in different individuals: subjects with high-confidence reported that they perceived the duration signaled by the monetary gain condition as longer than subjects with low-confidence. Our results showed that only high-confidence individuals overestimated the monetary gain context. Finally, we found a negative relationship between confidence and time perception, and that confidence bias at the maximum uncertainty duration of 450 ms is predictive of time perception. Taken together, the current study demonstrates that subjective measure of the confidence profile caused overestimation of time rather than by the outcome valence of reward expectancy.