How much time do you spend looking at status updates, comments or photos from friends on Facebook? According to a study carried out by scientists at the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience and Cognitive Systems at the University of Kent (United Kingdom), it is likely that you will go through much more than you think. And it is that experts have discovered that browsing the Internet or social networks such as Facebook can distort our perception of time, with Facebook having the greatest impact at the level of unconscious time consumption.
The truth is that thanks to tablets, smartphones or laptops, Internet access is at your fingertips almost anywhere and at any time. Which, a priori, can have its advantages, since we can search for addresses or check our email whenever necessary, also has its negative part.
According to a 2016 report from the Pew Research Center, about 76% of Facebook users visit the social network every day and 55% of them visit it several times a day.
The researchers wanted to find out how the use of the internet and Facebook impacted our perception of time. For this, they had the participation of 44 adults to whom they presented various images. Five of these images were related to Facebook, five were associated with the Internet in general, and the remaining 10 were generic control images.
After viewing each image – for different periods of time, the volunteers had to explain whether they had seen the image for a short or a long period of time. The funny thing was that the participants were more likely to underestimate the amount of time spent viewing images related to the Internet and Facebook , compared to the control images. Images linked to Facebook were associated with the greatest distortion in perception of time.
The researchers say that these findings suggest that both the Internet and Facebook can alter the perception of time by modifying the attention process.
“We found evidence that stimuli related to the Internet and Facebook can distort the perception of time due to mechanisms related to attention and arousal .”
The study has been published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology.
