Abstract: Relevant research has shown that heroin abstainers’ several cognitive functions are impaired. As a basic function of the central nervous system, time information processing is the basis of various cognitive processing. Drug use can affect time perception, conversely, the distortion of time perception may also lead to drug use. Generally, drug abstainers have changes in time perception, but different drug abstainers have different changes in time perception. Currently, it is not quite clear what kind of time perception characteristics of heroin abstainers are. Therefore, this paper aims to explore the time perception characteristics of heroin abstainers. It selected 32male heroin abstainers (average age: 47.78±6.90 years) from a compulsory drug rehabilitation center in Gansu Province as the abstainer group. Via recruitment, it selected 32 healthy male participants (average age: 45.03 ± 8.24 years) who had never been addicted to any drugs as the control group. All subjects were right-handed and had normal or corrected-to-normal vision and took tests with Beck Anxiety Inventory, Beck Depression Inventory and Barratt Impulsiveness Inventory before the experiment was conducted. The study used a temporal bisection task which included 7 kinds of time interval stimuli. Among them, the standard short time interval was 400ms; the standard long time interval was 1600ms; and the comparison time intervals were 600ms, 800ms, 1000ms, 1200ms and 1400ms. Software E-Prime 2.0 was adopted to collect data. In addition, a repeated-measures ANOVA of 2 (subject type: heroin abstainer group, control group) × 7 (time interval: 400ms, 600ms, 800ms, 1000ms, 1200ms, 1400ms, 1600ms) was performed using SPSS17.0. The proportions of the subjects’ long duration responses were calculated based on their judgements. A plot of the proportions formed a psychometric function that was described as Sigmoid (S) curve. Then, Matlab was used to carry out Sigmoid curve fitting for each group, and the point of subjective equality (PSE) and Weber Ratio(WR) were calculated according to the Sigmoid function obtained from fitting. The result showed a significant main effect of time interval (F (6, 372)= 710.08, P<.001, η2=.92) and a significant interaction between time interval and subject type(F (6, 372)=3.46, p< .05，η2=.05). Besides, compared with the control group, the heroin abstainer group's judgment for the proportion of long response was higher than that of the control group at all 7 kinds of time intervals. However, there was no significant difference in the judgment for short time interval of 400ms and for long time interval of 1200ms, 1400ms and 1600ms between the two groups. While there was significant difference in the judgment for intermediate time interval of 600ms, 800ms and 1000ms. The statistical results of PSE and WR showed that the PSE of the heroin abstainer group was lower than the control group and the difference was significant; while there was no significant difference in WR compared with the normal control group. Based on the result, we can draw below conclusion. Heroin abstainers tend to overestimate time and such overestimation is more greatly reflected in their judgment for the intermediate time interval.

Key words: Heroin abstainers, time perception, temporal bisection task, internal clock

摘要： 本研究采用时间二分任务来探讨海洛因戒断者的时间知觉特征。结果发现: (1)戒断组的长反应比例在中间时距上显著高于对照组; (2)戒断组的主观相等点低于对照组且差异显著, 韦伯比例与对照组相比差异不显著。结论: 海洛因戒断者更容易高估时间, 并且对时间的高估更多体现在中间时距上。

关键词: 海洛因戒断者 时间知觉 时间二分任务 内部时钟