Do we all have a universal perception of time? There’s a lot that scientists just don’t know about this concept, but some have suggested that humans all share an “internal clock” that tells us how much time has passed. However, a new study has added evidence to the contrary, showing how altering an environment can shape our perception of the passage of time whilst observing it.
Dr Martin Wiener and colleagues at George Mason University recruited 170 people who each participated in one of four experiments. The first two focused on how the size of a scene and how cluttered it is affects the perception of time.
Participants were shown photographs of different spaces – like a bathroom, a theater auditorium, or an airport terminal – that were of different sizes and contained different amounts of clutter. The images remained on the screen for between 300 and 900 milliseconds, and once they’d disappeared the participants were asked to rate each image as “long” or “short”.
People felt they had been looking at the larger and less busy images for longer than they really had been. This effect is called time dilation, and it also explains why time seems to drag so much when you’re bored – something you are, of course, not experiencing right now.
The next two experiments explored the interplay between the memorability of an image and time dilation. Memorability is not well understood by scientists, but it’s thought to relate to features like how distinctive an image is. In a press conference about the research, Dr Wiener gave some other curious examples – the color red seems to persist in the memory longer than blue, for example, and images containing large numbers also tend to be more memorable.
Using a database of images previously given a memorability score, participants were again asked to rate images as “short” or “long”. In the final experiment, the subjects were asked to hold down a button for the same length of time as they had been looking at each image. The following day, they came back to the lab for a surprise recall test, to see if they could correctly pick out images they had seen the previous day.
More memorable images also had a time-dilating effect. Not only that, but the participants’ perception of time was also more accurate when they were looking at memorable images, and their reaction times faster.
The images that they felt they’d been looking at the longest were also remembered better the next day, a world-first finding that opens up the tantalizing possibility that simply making someone feel like they’ve been looking at something for longer could genuinely boost their ability to memorize it.
What all this means, according to Dr Wiener, is that time perception appears to be a fairly basic function within the brain that is heavily influenced by sensory involvement. This challenges the idea of a “universal internal clock”, though the team acknowledges that more research is needed.
As to why this happens, it’s possible that it evolved to help humans soak up as much information as possible about their surroundings. Dr Wiener explained that the human brain’s processing time when looking at a scene is only about 1 second. Time dilation could allow the brain to eke this out, to give it more time to gather potentially important information.
This could also fit with the idea that time is perceived to contract when observing a very cluttered scene. Human vision isn’t great at coping with mess, so it’s possible the brain conserves energy in these situations rather than spending time trying to discern information.
The research has important implications beyond enhancing our understanding of our own minds. Artificial intelligence is becoming more and more deeply embedded within human society, but for it to properly interact with humans we will have to find a way to imbue it with a concept of time, something it currently lacks.
A better grasp of the psychology of time perception could also be useful in helping people with conditions like schizophrenia and ADHD, which are known to disrupt the concept of time.
Ultimately, many of the conclusions remain conjecture for now, but it will be fascinating to see what future experiments reveal.
The study is published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.
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