Timing and Physiological Arousal: Implications for Human Performance

The estimation of time intervals is crucial in the performance of any motoric task, such as hitting a baseball. The timing of the swing is arguably the most important part of the swing, but what if physiological arousal, due to the stress, of the moment alters the batter’s ability to estimate that short interval between the pitch and the swing? There have been a number of models developed to explain how the batter will perform the task, going as far back as the Yerkes-Dodson Law (Yerkes & Dodson, 1908). The purpose of this study is to investigate how physiological arousal will affect an individual’s ability to estimate time intervals and the points where they will over and underestimate time. Participants were placed into a high physiological arousal group, by performing jumping jacks, a resting group (no jumping jacks). Participants were asked to perform a duration reproduction task, performing, or not performing, jumping jacks between each block. The results showed that the elevated physiological arousal in the jumping jack condition resulted in greater overestimation of the durations. These findings have implications for understanding failures in human performance during time sensitive scenarios and provide a basis for developing biofeedback training to help reduce these errors in duration estimation because of elevated physiological arousal.