Musical training attenuates self-reference effects on duration perception

Human time perception is highly flexible, shaped not only by sensory input but also by high-level cognitive influences. Among these, self-referential stimuli automatically capture attentional resources and are hypothesized to interfere with concurrent temporal processing. We investigated whether temporal expertise, developed through extensive musical training, provides a cognitive buffer against this interference. Using a temporal bisection task with novel visual and auditory stimuli arbitrarily associated with the self or another person, we compared trained and untrained participants (total N = 136). Our results showed that self-association selectively attenuates temporal precision only in the untrained group, while participants with extensive musical training maintained stable precision. Crucially, no effect on perceptual bias was observed in either condition. These results demonstrate that the temporal impact of high-level cognitive factors is not universal, confirming that extensive musical training confers robust resilience to top-down influences in duration perception.