Quote:The smaller an animal is, and the faster its metabolic rate, the slower time passes for it, scientists found.

This means that across a wide range of species, time perception is directly related to size, with animals smaller than us seeing the world in slow motion.

The findings, published in the journal Animal Behaviour, come from research into the ability of animals to detect separate flashes of fast-flickering light.

"Critical flicker fusion frequency" - the point at which the flashes seem to merge together, so that a light source appears constant - provides an indication of time perception.

Comparing studies of the phenomenon in different animals revealed the link with size.

Quote:Body size and metabolic rate both fundamentally constrain how species interact with their environment, and hence ultimately affect their niche. While many mechanisms leading to these constraints have been explored, their effects on the resolution at which temporal information is perceived have been largely overlooked. The visual system acts as a gateway to the dynamic environment and the relative resolution at which organisms are able to acquire and process visual information is likely to restrict their ability to interact with events around them. As both smaller size and higher metabolic rates should facilitate rapid behavioural responses, we hypothesized that these traits would favour perception of temporal change over finer timescales. Using critical flicker fusion frequency, the lowest frequency of flashing at which a flickering light source is perceived as constant, as a measure of the maximum rate of temporal information processing in the visual system, we carried out a phylogenetic comparative analysis of a wide range of vertebrates that supported this hypothesis. Our results have implications for the evolution of signalling systems and predator–prey interactions, and, combined with the strong influence that both body mass and metabolism have on a species' ecological niche, suggest that time perception may constitute an important and overlooked dimension of niche differentiation.

(09-17-2013, 06:29 PM)Gemini Wolf Wrote: I've had it where I went into a restaurant, ordered, ate and left, and only 5 minutes had passed on the clock. And I wasn't rushing.