Changes in the experience of time: The impact of spatial information on the perception and memory of duration

Abstract

Although it is understood that our experience of time is fluid and subjective, the cognitive mechanisms underlying this phenomenon are not well described. Based on event-segmentation theory, we tested the hypothesis that changes in the context, particularly the spatial context, of an experience impact how an individual perceives (encodes) and remembers the length of that event. A group of participants viewed short videos of scenes from movies that either contained shifts in spatial context (e.g., characters moving through doorways) or did not contain any shifts in spatial context. In one task, participants estimated a randomly selected time duration (between 10 and 23 seconds) when encoding these videos. In a second task, the same participants estimated the duration of the videos after viewing them. We found that even though the presence of spatial shifts impacted how time was perceived, the nature of this effect differed as a function of task. Specifically, when time was estimated at encoding, these estimates were longer for videos that did not contain spatial shifts compared to those with spatial shifts. However, when these estimates were made at retrieval, durations were reported as longer for videos with spatial context shifts than those without. A second experiment replicated these main findings in a new sample. We interpret these results as providing new evidence for theories on how context changes, particularly those in spatial information, distort the experience of time differently during the encoding and retrieval phases of memory.

Movie editing influences spectators’ time perception

“…The authors showed that reproduction was shorter for eventful videos compared to the other two conditions, and for uneventful videos compared to the blank condition. Similar results were found by Fenerci, et al 24 reporting that videos containing an single event boundary (spatial shift) were reproduced as shorter than target durations, compared to videos not containing boundaries (steady-cam shot), and that the duration of the same videos was retrospectively judged as longer (see also 37 ). Taken together, these results suggest that the number of events (spatial shifts or cuts) makes participants perceive that more time has passed.…”

“…This facilitates the perceptual and cognitive organization of information, allowing the system to efficiently and transiently allocate attentional resources to pertinent information, to structure it and make sense of it, resulting in a mnemonic advantage for information that has been properly segmented. Despite the numerous studies investigating the impact of event segmentation on attentional and memory processes, a surprising few investigate the impact of segmentation on time perception 23 , 24 , 36 . In an initial study, Bangert, et al 23 asked participants to reproduce a previously encoded duration while watching naturalistic videos containing many (eventful), few (uneventful) event boundaries or a blank screen.…”

“…In this case, we should predict an underestimation of duration, since temporal information is lost. Nevertheless, there are studies reporting that scenes containing more events are perceived as longer 23 , 24 . As we have seen, action discontinuities are robust indicators of events boundaries, so we should predict that scenes containing discontinuities should be judged as longer.…”

Slices of the past: how events are temporally compressed in episodic memory

“…In this article, we review recent research that has advanced our understanding of how the unfolding of real-life events is compressed in episodic memory representations. Note that due to space limitation, we focus on studies that investigated the temporal compression of events in memory but do not address research on memory for temporal information per se, such as judgments of duration or recency (see e.g., Block & Reed, 1978;Brunec et al, 2017;DuBrow & Davachi, 2013;Fenerci et al, 2020;Yarmey, 2000).…”

“…Note that a similar relation has been observed for the remembered duration of an event, with evidence showing that duration estimates increase with the amount of information retrieved from memory-more specifically the amount of perceptual or contextual changes in the remembered event (see e.g.,Block & Reed, 1978;Fenerci et al, 2020;Jeunehomme & D'Argembeau, 2019;Roseboom et al, 2019).…”