Psychosocial stress selectively disrupts temporal neural processing with exploratory epigenetic contributions

Time perception is influenced by internal states, including emotional and physiological conditions. Negative states such as stress can distort perceived duration, often making intervals feel longer. However, the neural and molecular basis of this phenomenon remains unclear.

In this multimodal study, 45 healthy adults (23 males, mean age: 23.73 ± 3.85) performed temporal and spatial reproduction tasks during fMRI under control and stress conditions. Stress was induced in half of the runs using an evaluative threat paradigm, and physiological responses were tracked via serial cortisol sampling. A significant condition-by-task interaction revealed that the concurrent stressor exposure selectively reduced activation in frontoparietal timing regions, including the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, superior temporal gyrus, inferior frontal gyrus and intraparietal sulcus, while spatial processing within these same regions remained comparably stable.

Despite stable behavioral performance, stress produced clear modulations in timing-related neural activity. This task-specific dissociation suggests that stress dynamically reconfigures cognitive resources within shared magnitude-processing systems, diverting them from time-specific networks. Exploratory analyses of five stress- and dopamine-related gene methylation revealed hypothesis-generating trends, linking epigenetic variability to individual differences in stress-induced neural changes; however, these associations did not survive multiple-comparisons correction.

Together, these findings provide an initial integrative framework for stress-induced disruptions in temporal cognition and point to epigenetic variability as one possible contributor to individual differences. We thank all our participants for their patience and Yasemin Gökçekuyu and Can Kaan Karahan for their help with the experimental paradigm. This work was funded by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK; grant number 219K089).

Université Paris Cité, Institute of Psychology, LaPsyDÉ, CNRS, Paris, F-75005, France Department of Interdisciplinary Neuroscience, Institute of Health Sciences, Ankara University, Ankara, Turkey Sertaç Üstün, Filiz Çetinkaya & Güvem Gümüş-Akay Department of Physiology, Faculty of Medicine, Ankara University, Ankara, Turkey Neuroscience and Neurotechnology Center of Excellence (NÖROM), Ankara University, Ankara, Turkey Sertaç Üstün, Filiz Çetinkaya, Güvem Gümüş-Akay & Metehan Çiçek Department of Physiology, Faculty of Medicine, Ankara Medipol University, Ankara, Turkey Correspondence to Sertaç Üstün or Metehan Çiçek. The authors declare no competing interests. Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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