Model of Anxiety Behavior Based on Time Perception and Anticipation in ACT-R

Humans live in the flow of time. However, the perception of time varies between individuals and changes depending on the situation. This variability is believed to be closely related to emotions. For example, people tend to perceive time as passing quickly when they are having fun, whereas they may feel it slows down when they are anxious. Based on this relationship, this study reports a simulation examining the effects of anxiety on perceptual-motor tasks from the perspective of time perception. Previous research on time perception suggests that anxiety increases arousal, which in turn makes time feel like it is passing more slowly. In particular, individuals with high trait anxiety are more sensitive to environmental changes, leading to more pronounced distortions in time perception. Considering these findings, this study conducted a simulation using the cognitive architecture ACT-R to investigate how anxiety affects perceptual-motor tasks. The modeling of anxiety in this study is based on the anticipation of failure-related memories. The simulation results confirmed that freezing behavior occurred in response to the task, affecting the model's performance.