Department of Psychology, University of Essex, Colchester, United Kingdom.
PLoS One. 2013;8(3):e59847. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0059847. Epub 2013 Mar 28.
Five experiments examined whether changes in the pace of external events influence people's judgments of duration. In Experiments 1a-1c, participants heard pieces of music whose tempo accelerated, decelerated, or remained constant. In Experiment 2, participants completed a visuo-motor task in which the rate of stimulus presentation accelerated, decelerated, or remained constant. In Experiment 3, participants completed a reading task in which facts appeared on-screen at accelerating, decelerating, or constant rates. In all experiments, the physical duration of the to-be-judged interval was the same across conditions. We found no significant effects of temporal structure on duration judgments in any of the experiments, either when participants knew that a time estimate would be required (prospective judgments) or when they did not (retrospective judgments). These results provide a starting point for the investigation of how temporal structure affects one-off judgments of duration like those typically made in natural settings.
五个实验检验了外部事件节奏的变化是否会影响人们对时间持续的判断。在实验 1a-1c 中，参与者听了音乐片段，这些音乐的节奏加速、减速或保持不变。在实验 2 中，参与者完成了一个视觉运动任务，在这个任务中，刺激呈现的速度加速、减速或保持不变。在实验 3 中，参与者完成了一个阅读任务，在这个任务中，事实以加速、减速或恒定的速度出现在屏幕上。在所有实验中，被判断的间隔的物理持续时间在不同条件下是相同的。我们发现，在任何一个实验中，当参与者知道需要进行时间估计时（前瞻性判断）或当他们不知道时（回溯性判断），时间结构对时间持续判断都没有显著影响。这些结果为研究时间结构如何影响一次性的时间持续判断提供了一个起点，这种判断通常是在自然环境中做出的。
