Difference Between the Judgment of Short and Long Durations: Estimates of Durations and Judgment of the Passage of Time

Abstract

Abstract This study aimed to examine intra-individual differences in both duration and passage of time (PoT) judgments, and the relationships between them, for a wide range of durations going from a few hundred milliseconds to several minutes. Participants performed a study with a within-subjects design with durations in the milliseconds (200–400 ms), seconds (2–4 s), tens of seconds (20–40 s) and minutes (2–4 min) ranges. For the duration judgments, the results revealed individual differences in temporal accuracy between short durations (<3 s) and long durations (>20 s). In contrast, positive relationships were observed for PoT judgments across the different time scales, except for the millisecond duration. Finally, a significant correlation between duration and PoT judgments appeared in our study only for durations longer than 1 s. Taken together, these results support the temporal taxonomy that distinguishes between the processing of short and long durations, with the latter likely being modulated by memory mechanisms and the awareness of the PoT.