Dopamine and the interdependency of time perception and reward

•Time perception and reward are psychologically linked.•Time perception and reward operate using common biological pathways.•Recent studies suggest nuanced and varied roles for dopamine in time perception.•Integrating the dimensions of reward and time may rationalize why time takes the neural and perceptual form that it does. Time is a fundamental dimension of our perception of the world and is therefore of critical importance to the organization of human behavior. A corpus of work — including recent optogenetic evidence — implicates striatal dopamine as a crucial factor influencing the perception of time. Another stream of literature implicates dopamine in reward and motivation processes. However, these two domains of research have remained largely separated, despite neurobiological overlap and the apothegmatic notion that “time flies when you’re having fun”. This article constitutes a review of the literature linking time perception and reward, including neurobiological and behavioral studies. Together, these provide compelling support for the idea that time perception and reward processing interact via a common dopaminergic mechanism.