As stated in AWS SWF PollForDecisionTask docs, Amazon SWF holds the connection open for up to 60 seconds, and returns a task as soon as it becomes available.
My problem is that I have a cron that runs the poller every one minute, so on each iteration I don't wont it to be running 60 seconds. Is there any way in which I could change that default value? (I'm using AWS SDK for JavaScript in Node.js).
There is no way to change this value. I would recommend switching from CRON to a persistently running process that executes poll in a loop.