Embodied attention shapes temporal cognition: effects of gaze direction and optokinetic stimulation on mental time travel and age judgement

Does visuospatial attention influence temporal cognition? In Study 1, we investigated whether gaze direction can modulate different aspects of temporal processing. Participants performed a Mental Time Travel (MTT) task judging the likelihood of past and future life events while their visuospatial attention was oriented by facial gaze cues directed leftward, rightward, or centrally (Experiment 1). To test whether visuospatial attention modulates representation of temporal duration (e.g., age estimation), participants completed an Age Judgment task estimating the age of face stimuli under the same gaze manipulations (Experiment 2). Results showed direction-specific effects in the MTT task: leftward gaze enhanced probability judgments for past events, while rightward gaze enhanced judgments for future events. In the Age Judgment task, gaze systematically biased perceived age, with leftward cues yielding younger estimates and rightward cues yielding older estimates. In Study 2, we tested whether these gaze-related effects require a lateralized bodily stimulus (a face) or reflect a general modulation of visuospatial attention. We used optokinetic stimulation (OKS) to shift visuospatial attention without lateralized bodily cues. OKS produced weaker direction-specific effects on the MTT task compared to gaze, but generated similar biases in the Age Judgment task. These findings indicate that visuospatial attention shapes temporal cognition through partially distinct neurocognitive routes: embodied cues like gaze facilitate self-projection during MTT, whereas body-unrelated manipulations such as OKS are sufficient to modulate temporal estimation along a Mental Time Line. Overall, these results reinforce the view that time is processed within a visuomotor architecture linking space, time, and the body.