As time goes by: Studies on the subjective perception of the speed by which time passes

Abstract

This thesis deals with an overlooked dimension of time judgments, namely subjective judgments of the speed of time passage: how fast time is judged as passing. It has examined how people make judgments of the speed of time passage and what factors influence people’s judgments of the speed of time passage. Chapter 2 first unravels the cognitive processes that underlie judgments of the speed of time passage: the more attention is paid to non-temporal information, the faster time is judged as passing; it also disentangles judgments of the speed of time passage from duration judgments (i.e., judgments about how long time lasted), demonstrating that it is not reliable to infer judgments of the speed of time passage from duration judgments. Chapter 3 builds upon the previous chapter and examines two factors: presentation speed of stimuli and comparison, which might interfere with the role of attentional processes in judging the speed of time passage. It shows that both presentation speed of stimuli and comparison could influence people’s judgments of the speed of time passage, but they could not replace the role of attentional processes: when either presentation speed of stimuli or comparison is missing, people can always rely on attentional processes to make judgments of the speed of time passage. Chapter 4 examines the influence of unpredictability on people’s judgments of the speed of time passage. It shows that time is judged as passing faster when people are in both temporal unpredictable situations where they cannot predict when the events would happen, and in content unpredictable situations where they cannot predict what events would happen next. Chapter 5 examines the influence of spatial directions of movements on judgments of the speed of time passage. It shows the effect that people judge time as passing faster for the left-to-right movements than the right-to-left movements. This effect was also replicated with Farsi speakers. Overall, the work in this thesis shows original empirical evidence about how people make judgments of the speed of time passage; specifically, it discloses the underlying mechanism of judgments of the speed of time passage (i.e., attentional processes) as well as the factors that influence people’s judgments of the speed of time passage such as presentation speed of stimuli, comparison, unpredictability and spatial directions of movements.