OSCR

Individual alpha frequency predicts the sensitivity of time perception.

Overview

Authors: Audrey Morrow1,2, Montana Wilson1,3, Michaela Geller-Montague1, Sara Soldano1, Sabah Hajidamji1, Jason Samaha1
ORCID iDs: Audrey Morrow, Jason Samaha
  1. University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA, United States
  2. University of California, San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, United States
  3. Stanford University, Stanford, CA, United States
Institutions: University of California, San Francisco (United States); University of California, Santa Cruz (United States); Stanford University (United States)
Journal: Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.), volume 4, article IMAG.a.1263
Dates: received 22 July 2025; accepted 26 April 2026; published online 4 June 2026
Type: Research article · Language: English
License: CC BY
Identifiers: DOI 10.1162/imag.a.1263 · PMID 42253610 · PMCID PMC13237996 · OpenAlex W4405717562
Open access: diamond, a free copy (OpenAlex)
Preprint: doi:10.1101/2024.12.16.628734
Status: data only
Categories: human (organism), cognitive (subfield)
Methods: Connectivity, Statistics, Smoothing, state filtering, decompositions, Preprocessing, Spectral & time-frequency, Physiology & signal measures
Keywords: alpha oscillations, individual differences, duration estimation, duration discrimination, time perception
Topic: Neuroscience and Music Perception (Cognitive Neuroscience, Neuroscience), according to OpenAlex
Funding: Intramural Research Program (T32DA007250)
Citations: not cited yet (Europe PMC); 61 references in the paper

Abstract

A growing body of research links individual differences in the frequency of alpha-band oscillations to temporal aspects of perception. However, whether the human alpha rhythm is a correlate of time perception itself has remained controversial. This study combined EEG with multiple duration estimation and discrimination tasks in order to evaluate whether individual alpha frequency (IAF) is associated with sensitivity or bias in judging visual durations across a range of peri-second durations (spanning 100 to 1200 ms). In a temporal estimation task, participants (n = 55) reported the duration of a single stimulus between 300–1200 ms. In a temporal discrimination task, participants reported which of two stimuli was longer: a standard (100, 600, or 1200 ms) or comparison (50–150% of the standard). Stimuli also varied in whether their luminance was static or dynamic (varying randomly over time). We found that IAF was significantly related to the variance of duration estimates, a measure of precision (or sensitivity), but not average duration estimates, a measure of bias. Further supporting this relationship, psychometric function slopes obtained from the independent duration discrimination tasks were positively correlated with IAF, particularly for the static stimulus conditions. These effects were largely consistent across the range of stimulus durations tested and held when controlling for participant age. Taken together, these results suggest that IAF may play a role in shaping individual differences in the sensitivity of time perception.

Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.

Code

The paper links to its data, not to its authors' code: see the Data section.

The paper's code and data availability statement is in the Data section.

Tracing map

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Data

Datasets cited

Data and Code Availability

The behavioral data and cleaned resting-state EEG data, as well as scripts for analyzing task data and extracting IAF, can be found at https://osf.io/5fc6q/overview.

Reproduced under the paper's license (CC BY), from the paper cited above.

Versions

The history of this record: each version stored by the harvester or made by a correction of its authors or of the maintainers of its code, and what changed in its facts. The texts of the paper (its abstract, its availability statements) are not part of it; versions that changed only those are not listed.

Version 2, 28 September 2026

  • Authors: added Jason Samaha (0000-0001-8010-5993); removed Jason Samaha

Version 1, 27 September 2026: the first record

Recorded: type, language, journal, volume, pages, dates, 6 authors, 5 keywords, 1 funder, 61 references.

Cite

This paper

Morrow, A., Wilson, M., Geller-Montague, M., Soldano, S., Hajidamji, S., & Samaha, J. (2026). Individual alpha frequency predicts the sensitivity of time perception. Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.), 4, IMAG.a.1263. https://doi.org/10.1162/imag.a.1263

BibTeX

@article{morrow2026individual,
author = {Morrow, Audrey and Wilson, Montana and Geller-Montague, Michaela and Soldano, Sara and Hajidamji, Sabah and Samaha, Jason},
title = {{Individual alpha frequency predicts the sensitivity of time perception}},
journal = {Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.)},
year = {2026},
month = jun,
volume = {4},
pages = {IMAG.a.1263},
publisher = {MIT Press},
issn = {2837-6056},
doi = {10.1162/imag.a.1263},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1162/imag.a.1263},
pmid = {42253610},
pmcid = {PMC13237996}
}

RIS

TY - JOUR
AU - Morrow, Audrey
AU - Wilson, Montana
AU - Geller-Montague, Michaela
AU - Soldano, Sara
AU - Hajidamji, Sabah
AU - Samaha, Jason
TI - Individual alpha frequency predicts the sensitivity of time perception
T2 - Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.)
J2 - Imaging Neurosci (Camb)
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/06/04
VL - 4
SP - IMAG.a.1263
SN - 2837-6056
PB - MIT Press
DO - 10.1162/imag.a.1263
UR - https://doi.org/10.1162/imag.a.1263
LA - en
ER -

CSL-JSON

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