Prospective and retrospective duration judgments: A meta-analytic review

Abstract

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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Insights into features of anxiety through multiple aspects of psychological time

“…[3,7,23]. For prospective time estimation, these findings can be understood in the framework of the attentional gate model (AGM) [17]. The AGM is a widely used cognitive model for explaining prospective time estimation.…”

“…Researchers usually distinguish between prospective and retrospective time estimation [17][18]. In prospective time estimation, subjects are asked beforehand to estimate time from now into some point in the future.…”

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“…People's insensitivity to duration seems to be partly due to a lack of attentional focus. While people typically underestimate the duration of an event (Block and Zakay 1997), they increase their estimations when their attention is directed to duration in advance (Zakay 1998). Similarly, elicitation methods such as choice, involving direct comparison of events of different duration, increase people's sensitivity to duration relative to elicitation methods that lack direct comparison, like ratings (Ariely and Loewenstein 2000).…”