Long-term temporal estimation in humans.

Abstract

Although the ability of subjects to judge the duration of a temporal interval has been investigated using a variety of paradigms, most of the studies have used very short intervals ranging from a few hundred milliseconds to several seconds. Therefore, the purpose of the present study was to examine the psychophysical relationship between judged and actual durations of longer intervals ranging from months to years. In Experiment 1, college students were asked to estimate the ages of 12 major news events which had occurred during the previous 5 years. Analysis of median estimates of each item showed that subjects underestimated the ages of the oldest items and overestimated the ages of the most recent items. To determine whether this regression effect was due to a response bias or to the context effect produced by other items on the questionnaire, Experiments 2 and 3 systematically varied the range of allowable response alternatives and the age of the background items that formed the context in which the experimental items were judged. Although the range of allowable response alternatives had a significant effect upon the estimates, no evidence was obtained for an item context effect. The data are interpreted in terms of a memory-based hypothesis which suggests that the subjects were attempting to recall the time of occurrence of the items and then deriving elapsed time rather than directly judging duration.