Psychological Time: Interval Length Judgments and Subjective Passage of Time Judgments

Time perception encompasses different subjective time experiences, like: (1) interval length (duration) estimation, and (2) subjective passage of time judgments, defined as the perceived speed of time passage. This study aims to investigate and clarify the impact of task difficulty, temporal relevance and hedonic interest on both interval length judgments and subjective passage of time judgments. Another aim of the study is to investigate whether interval length judgments and subjective passage of time judgments are related. The results of the present study indicate that task difficulty and temporal relevance have a significant impact on interval length judgments. In terms of their interaction, the results show that when the task is simple, a high temporal relevance leads to interval length overestimates. Another major finding of this study was that subjective time passage judgments seem to be affected by the same factors as interval length estimation. In other words, results indicate that both temporal relevance and level of task difficulty have a significant impact on subjective time passage judgments. Also, we found a significant correlation between interval length judgments and subjective passage of time judgments, indicating that a longer interval estimate is associated with a slower perceived time passage. The results of the present study are discussed in terms of the attentional models of time perception.