Abstract
Time perception is studied with subjective or semi-objective psychophysical methods. With subjective methods, observers provide quantitative estimates of duration and data depict the psychophysical function relating subjective duration to objective duration. With semi-objective methods, observers provide categorical or comparative judgments of duration and data depict the psychometric function relating the probability of a certain judgment to objective duration. Both approaches are used to study whether subjective and objective time run at the same pace or whether time flies or slows down under certain conditions. We analyze theoretical aspects affecting the interpretation of data gathered with the most widely used semi-objective methods, including single-presentation and paired-comparison methods. For this purpose, a formal model of psychophysical performance is used in which subjective duration is represented via a psychophysical function and the scalar property. This provides the timing component of the model, which is invariant across methods. A decisional component that varies across methods reflects how observers use subjective durations to make judgments and give the responses requested under each method. Application of the model shows that psychometric functions in single-presentation methods are uninterpretable because the various influences on observed performance are inextricably confounded in the data. In contrast, data gathered with paired-comparison methods permit separating out those influences. Prevalent approaches to fitting psychometric functions to data are also discussed and shown to be inconsistent with widely accepted principles of time perception, implicitly assuming instead that subjective time equals objective time and that observed differences across conditions do not reflect differences in perceived duration but criterion shifts. These analyses prompt evidence-based recommendations for best methodological practice in studies on time perception.
Highlights
The shape of psychometric functions for paired-comparison tasks is determined by an embedded representation of subjective duration (μ and σ) and by aspects of the decision process
In contrast to single-presentation methods, paired-comparison methods are free of complications arising from untestable assumptions regarding the placement and stability of anchors
An added value of paired-comparison methods is that they lend themselves to a separate analysis of data for each presentation order (Figure 7), by which the influence of criteria and decisional bias on observed performance is separated from that of true differences in subjective duration or in its variance
Summary
Finely-tuned time perception seems to arise after higher-level cognitive processes are sufficiently developed (Block et al, 1999; Droit-Volet, 2013) and given explicit experience with objective time. It is unclear whether our ability to represent and quantify time stems from a timing mechanism (an “internal clock”) that keeps track of time and can be read like a watch or, rather, only reflects our learning to translate experienced intervals into magnitudes expressed in the physical units of time that we got accustomed to. Mechanistic accounts of timing processes have the status of metaphors (Wackermann, 2011), but difficulties to unravel those processes does not reduce our interest in investigating the phenomenon of time perception and the factors that affect it
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