Internet addiction and time perception

Research has shown that non-substance addictions can cause similar attention biases as substance addictions. The last decades, together with the boom of the internet a new non-substance addiction materialized, the Internet or Online addiction (IA). The last years more research has explored the underlying mechanisms that are involved in IA, however there is not much research on how IA affects our time perception. With the current study, using a time bisection task, we aimed to explore possible attention bias towards internet related stimuli and also look for possible practice effects from performing the task five consecutive times (five blocks). Analysis of the Weber Ratios (WR) suggests that Internet related stimuli maintain a good discriminability across blocks, contrary to neutral stimuli that lead to decreasing discriminability. Furthermore, analysis of the bisection points (BP) suggests that participants’ arousal levels drop at a much slower pace across blocks for Internet related stimuli compared to neutral matched stimuli.