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A meta-analytic review compared prospective and retrospective judgments of duration, or duration judgment paradigm. Some theorists have concluded that the two paradigms involve similar cognitive processes, whereas others have found that they involve different processes. A review of 20 experiments revealed that prospective judgments are longer and less variable than are retrospective judgments. Several theoretically important variables moderate these effects, especially those concerned with information processing activities. Therefore, somewhat different cognitive processes subserve experienced and remembered duration. Attentional models are needed to explain prospective judgments, and memory-based models are needed to explain retrospective judgments. These findings clarify models of human duration judgment and suggest directions for future research. Evidence on duration judgments may also influence models of attention and memory.Timing is essential to ensure the optimal functioning of organisms. People may look both backward and forward into time, remembering past events and anticipating future events. Under many conditions, people focus mainly on present events. A person must encode temporal properties of important events, construct cognitive representations of those properties, and use those representations for actions. For example, driving a car requires a person to estimate durations in order to engage in appropriate actions at the correct time.Perhaps because the time dimension plays such an important role, the psychology of time was one of the important topics of early psychological research and theorizing (Block, 1990;Michon & Jackson, 1985). We may view human temporal experiences in several ways, depending on whether we emphasize simultaneity, successiveness, temporal order, duration, or temporal perspective. We focus here on duration, especially in the range of seconds and minutes. Duration timing in this range is essential for representing the present and recently past external environment. The experience ofduration is the most

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