Connecting Time

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Past research suggests that scene organization affects duration judgments (Varakin, Klemes, & Porter, 2013, QJEP). The current experiments investigated whether organization affects duration judgments for arrays of abstract geometric shapes, using the gestalt cue of “connectedness” as a test case. In experiment 1, participants (n = 26) performed a temporal bisection task, judging on each trial whether an object array’s duration was closer to a pre-learned short (400ms) or long (1600ms) standard. On each trial, one of two kinds of arrays was presented: unorganized or organized. The 6 elements of unorganized arrays (two lines and four shapes) were presented at random, non-overlapping positions. In organized arrays, each line connected two shapes, thus creating two groupings. Bisection points (BP), calculated separately for each array type for each participant, were used to evaluate duration judgment biases. A BP is the duration at which 50% of the responses are predicted to be long, thus, smaller BPs indicate longer subjective duration. Unlike past work using real scenes, BPs for unorganized arrays (M = 981ms, SD = 109ms) were lower than BPs for organized scenes (M = 1011ms, SD = 115ms), (p< .05). To ensure participants attended to connectedness, in experiment 2 participants (n = 24) classified scenes as either organized or unorganized on half the trials, and performed temporal bisection on the rest. Participants did not know which task was to be performed until the end of a trial. In contrast to experiment 1, but consistent with past work using realistic scenes, BPs for organized scenes (M = 952 ms, SD = 155 ms) were smaller than BPs for unorganized scenes (M = 1030 ms, SD = 180 ms), (p< .05). Together, these results suggest that connectedness affects duration judgments, but the direction of the effect may depend on how participants process the display. Meeting abstract presented at VSS 2015