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An event-termination cue causes perceived time to dilate

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Abstract

The perceived duration of time does not veridically reflect the physical duration but is distorted by various factors, such as the stimulus magnitude or the observer’s emotional state. Here, we showed that knowledge about an event’s termination time is another significant factor. We often experience time passage differently when we know that an event will terminate soon. To quantify this, we asked 33 university students to report a rotating clock hand’s duration with or without a termination cue that indicated the position at which the clock hand disappeared. The results showed that the presence of the termination cue dilated perceived durations, and the dilating effect was larger when the stimulus duration was longer, or the speed of the rotating stimulus was slower. A control experiment with a start-cue excluded the possibility that the cue’s mere existence caused the results. Further computational analyses based on the attention theory-of-time perception revealed that the size of dilation is best explained by neither an event’s duration nor the distance traveled by the clock hand, but by how long the clock hand spends time near the termination cue. The results imply that an event-termination cue generates a field in which the perceived time dilates.

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Data availability

Stimuli, data, and relevant codes for the experiments have been made publicly available via the Open Science Framework and can be accessed at https://osf.io/ys7tg/. The design and analysis plans for the experiments were not preregistered.

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Funding

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2018R1A2B6008959 and NRF-2023R1A2C1007917). The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare that are relevant to the content of this article.

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  1. Department of Biomedical Engineering, Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology, 50 UNIST-gil, Ulsan, 44919, Republic of Korea

    Seonggyu Choe & Oh-Sang Kwon

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  1. Seonggyu Choe
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S.C. and O.-S.K. designed research, performed research, analyzed data, and wrote the paper.

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Correspondence to Oh-Sang Kwon.

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Choe, S., Kwon, OS. An event-termination cue causes perceived time to dilate. Psychon Bull Rev 31, 659–669 (2024). https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-023-02368-1

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