EXPRESS: Ordinary People Think Merely Of Spending Time, But Schizotypy Perceive Time More Accurately.

Duration judgement is a central tenet of cognitive life however, a large body of evidence suggests that time perception is impaired in schizophrenia and schizotypy. Conclusions about the similar aetiology of both, are constrained by empirical evidence, with no evidence about the performance of schizotypy in the Temporal Reproduction Task. For the first time, a Temporal Reproduction Task examined the impact of Schizotypy on both the Retrospective and Prospective paradigms for visual stimuli. The task involved subjects reproducing one of three durations (15s, 30s, or 45s) of a kitten video in either a retrospective or prospective paradigm in Experiment 1 and a video of the River Nene in Northampton, United Kingdom, in Experiment 2. Both Experiments were then combined to form an Experiment 3. Subjects, in the retrospective paradigm, were not informed that they were partaking in a timing task in contrast to those, in the prospective paradigm, who were aware they were in a timing task. Critical findings that emerged from this study is that High Schizotypy subjects appear to have a greater degree of accuracy in reproducing durations, which is mediated by the context of the stimulus. This finding implies that the pacemaker/accumulator component of Scalar Expectancy Theory can be used to further explore timing deficits in Schizophrenic subjects and might further imply that timing deficits in Schizophrenia are driven by attentional deficits.