On the Clock? An Empirical Investigation of Psychological Time Distortions

Abstract

The study of time perception typically involves asking people to guess how long a task took to complete. This is called a duration estimate. The accuracy of their estimate is then compared with the actual task's duration. This approach is widely used for brief tasks and it underpins several models of psychological time distortion. However, duration estimates may not fully capture the subjective experience of time. This thesis was thus an investigation into additional measures of temporal experience (estimate uncertainty and passage of time judgements). These measures were tested across varying experimental conditions (increasingly longer task durations; levels of task difficulty; intentional vs. incidental encoding of time). The first chapter of this thesis synthesizes the extant literature on duration estimates, estimate uncertainty, and passage of time judgements. The second chapter outlines a series of three experiments investigating two main questions: 1) At what timescales traditional models accurately predict duration estimation? 2) Under what conditions are passage of time judgments and duration estimates related? The third chapter synthesizes and discusses the results. Although there was no direct, consistent relationship between subjective pace of time experienced throughout the task (passage of time judgements) and duration estimate accuracy across experiments, an indirect relationship emerged. The two forms of time judgements are perhaps indirectly related through the information processing demands of the task. Passage of time judgements rely heavily on internal task appraisals (e.g., boredom), which vary with task difficulty and duration, whereas duration estimates fit better within traditional models of time perception that predict estimation accuracy in single-task versus dual-task conditions. Together, these findings highlight important distinctions between different forms of temporal judgment and provides insight into the complexity of how time is experienced and reported.