Temporal order perception is essential for understanding the succession of events, and is suggested to be affected by attention or metaphorical space-time mapping. Attention theories predict that near or large objects capture attention and enter into consciousness earlier, while the metaphor hypothesis links the concepts of 'far' and 'past' in many languages, predicting that far objects is perceived as appearing earlier. This study investigated temporal order perception in three-dimensional (3D) space to clarify its underlying mechanism. Across three experiments, participants performed a temporal order judgment task, reporting which of two objects appeared first. Using binocular disparity (Experiment 1) and pictorial depth cues (gradient background and relative size, Experiment 2), we observed a consistent bias: distant and smaller objects were perceived as appearing earlier. Experiment 3 manipulated the congruency of depth cues (disparity and relative size), and the bias was reduced under incongruent conditions, indicating a joint effect of integrating depth information during temporal order perception. These findings reveal a systematic temporal bias in 3D space that challenges attentional accounts and aligns with the linguistic metaphor hypothesis, suggesting that perception is biased by prior knowledge through space-time metaphoric mapping.

This study examines attention to pain-related facial expressions in healthy individuals during a cold pain induction, as well as the efficacy of acceptance- or distraction-based instructions in modifying attentional patterns during the induction. Sixty pain-free participants completed an attentional task to analyse attentional biases towards pain-related facial expressions (Stage 1). Immediately afterwards, they performed a Cold Pressor Task (CPT) to obtain pain-related measures. Then, participants were randomly assigned to either an experimental group (n = 30), which performed the attentional task with cold water (acute pain condition), or a control group (n = 30), which performed the task with room-temperature water (Stage 2). Finally, both groups performed the same attentional task and were instructed to use two different coping strategies -acceptance and distraction-in a counterbalanced order under cold-pain conditions (Stage 3). Attentional biases to pain stimuli were found under pain-free conditions. The cold pain induction did not increase attention to pain-related stimuli; instead, it decreased attention to both pain and neutral stimuli. Regarding the efficacy of the guided coping strategies, acceptance followed by distraction (but not the reverse) significantly reduced attention to pain-related information. This study confirms the presence of attentional biases in pain-free individuals. However, the pain induction task reduced attention to both pain and neutral stimuli. More importantly, our study also showed that the order in which strategies are employed to cope with painful sensations is crucial for modifying attentional biases. This order effect might be a relevant mechanism that could inform future psychological interventions to treat pain. This study confirms that individuals without pain show attentional biases to pain-related information. In terms of coping strategies, we found a beneficial effect of using pain acceptance followed by distraction, not the other way around, to reduce attention to pain-related stimuli in an acute pain state. This finding of an order effect of coping strategies could be relevant for guiding psychological interventions on pain.

Emotionally intense events, such as those involving fear, anger, sadness, or joy, rarely occur in isolation. Instead, they are embedded within neutral moments, creating a dynamic, interconnected narrative. This study examined how the temporal dynamics of emotion shape what neutral content "carries" about an emotional experience via a unique paradigm designed to probe memory for different facets of an event, including specificity, emotionality, and temporal order. During an encoding phase, participants sequentially encoded image triplets: a neutral before-object, a negative or neutral middle-scene, and a neutral after-object, then rated the emotional valence of the middle-scene. Next, participants completed a retrieval phase wherein they were presented with either the before or after cue and asked questions regarding their memory for the triplet containing that object. Results across two independent samples largely converged in their findings that cueing with after content improved specificity, precision, and emotional integrity when retrieving a negative event. Results from the temporal-order memory task suggested a potential response bias, wherein participants indicated that the object on the screen was presented after the associated scene, regardless of valence. Our study provides new insights into how humans can form and subsequently retrieve a dynamic, interconnected narrative from significant life experiences.

Contrary to the widespread stereotype that women are better at multitasking than men, no consistent sex differences in multitasking abilities between males and females have been found. We developed a novel multitasking paradigm consisting of five tasks designed to simulate real-life scenarios. In Study 1, 41 males and 37 females (the ‘multitaskers’) performed similarly in all tasks except a conversation task, which males ignored more than twice as often as females. To test whether this sex difference is noticeable to others, in Study 2 160 naïve observers watched videos of the multitaskers and rated their appearance. Females were rated as being more in control of the task, performing better, and being less stressed than males. Importantly, these ratings were strongly influenced by the conversation task performance. Therefore, this study not only showed a sex difference in multitasking performance but also that this difference impacts how multitaskers are perceived by others, providing a potential explanation for the development of a stereotype that women are better at multitasking than men.Supplementary InformationThe online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s00426-026-02279-5.

Listening to a computer-presented stomach rumble can induce an illusion, whereby the sound seems to arise from one's own body - illusory mislocalisation. This represents one of the few examples of an interoceptive illusion and has been used to examine the nature of interoceptive hunger. The illusion's mechanism(s) is unknown as are the conditions necessary to maximise it. Here, we examine if illusory mislocalisation can be augmented by manipulating the ambiguity of the sound source. Participants were randomised to one of two conditions, either receiving sounds via headphones or from a hidden speaker. Test sounds - stomach rumbles, electrical noise, and silence - were presented in conjunction with food pictures, with participants judging desire to eat the depicted foods and the sound's source. Participants in both conditions experienced episodes of illusory mislocalisation (Cohen's d's > 1.3). However, significantly more people experienced it in the hidden speaker condition (Cohen's d = 0.4). Desire to eat ratings were higher in those reporting illusory mislocalisation, but this did not differ by sound presentation condition. The implications for putative models of illusory mislocalisation - notably associative and multisensory accounts - are discussed, with an adapted multisensory account best supported.