Is the past farther than the future? A registered replication and test of the time-expansion hypothesis based on the filling rate of duration.

Abstract

Caruso etal. (2013) reported the Temporal Doppler Effect (TDE), in which people feel that the past is farther than the future. In this study, we made two high-power (N=2244 in total), direct replication studies of Caruso etal. and additionally examined whether illusory temporal expansion, depending on the degree of fulfillment in durations, is related to the TDE. We predicted that the past would be felt farther than the future because the filling rate of duration of the past should be higher than that of the future. The results showed that psychological distance was significantly closer in the past than in the future and was inconsistently correlated with the filling rate of duration or the number and length of events and errands. Further, in some cases, the correlations were significant in the opposite direction of the predictions. Overall, our results did not replicate the previous findings but were reversed, and the filling rate of duration failed to explain the psychological distance. Based on these findings, we highlight the aspects that need to be clarified in future TDE studies. Preregistered Stage 1 protocol: https://osf.io/d9ec3/ (date of in-principle acceptance: 19/04/2022).