INTRODUCTION:

Time Perception is attributed to subjective experience of time which is measured by the persons own perception of the duration of the events. The concept of “time perception” has been introduced by Fraisse in 1984. According to him time perception can be understand by two underlying concept a) Succession and b) Duration. When two or more event are recognized as different and organized sequentially is known as succession. Duration is defined as temporal difference between two successive events. It can be noted that there is no duration without succession of events. As a result object or event can be objectively perceived but duration can’t perceived. Time estimation is an important ability in order to adapt their surrounding environment for wellbeing. Block (1990) pointed out the relevance of psychological time in human life and found it so important that it has been intensely investigated by different researchers. The intention of such studies was to explain how people perceive time differently from its objective timing. Time is an important dimension of our observed world (Buhusi and Meck, 2005). People’s time perception has been predisposed to deviate from its objective time depending on what they were executing during that particular period of time (Buhusi and Meck, 2009). Time feels to be seemingly passes faster when people have a good time, whereas it drags when they struggle situation or exhibit avoidance situation to face. The time estimated by observer is not actual like chronological time because it indicates the subjective experience of time depending on human experiences.

Numerous studies on time perception have their focal point on duration which is the representation of present and recent past events, (Droit-Volet, Mermillod, Cocenassilva, and Gil, 2010, Fraisse, 1984, Gan, Wang, Zhang, Li, and Luo, 2009, Yadav, Naveen, Tiwari, Singh, Singh, and Singh, 2018, Zhang, Liu, Wang, Chen, and Luo, 2014 ) Although humans have no sensory organ for temporal judgment, it is asserted that cognitive and biological processes might explain the processing of time perception of human beings. Zakay and Block (1996) have derived that attention and memory related cognitive processes can be essential parameter to estimate a given time duration

Experiments on time estimation have majorly used two dominant paradigms: prospective and retrospective paradigm (Block and Zakay, 1997, Khan, Sharma and Dixit, 2006, Zakay and Block, 2004). In prospective paradigm, person knows in advance that a duration judgment is required, whereas in retrospective paradigm, person does not have this prior knowledge.

Temporal processing is an integral component of different everyday goal oriented behaviors and plays a crucial role in daily activities of human time estimation (Matell and Meck, 2000). Furthermore, it plays a crucial role in different cognitive processes such as planning, processing and decision making when people need to attain goals or complete an activity on time. The processing underlying time estimation can be understand in the light of Vierordt’s law, which explains that participants highly underestimate time in long time duration (Lejeune and Wearden, 2009). Accuracy of time estimation is better in short time interval as compared to longer (Gruber and Block, 2013). Researchers have established several factors which regulate time perception such as task demands (Casini and Macar, 1997), task difficulty (Robinson, 2001, Zakay, 1992), task duration (Eisler, 1976; Sari, 2015, Zakay, 1993) etc. These factors lead to some errors in judgment of time-duration like overestimation or underestimation (Flaherty, 1999). The present study made an attempt to assess the effect of varied temporal interval on time perception using prospective judgment paradigm. It was hypothesized that time perception would be better during short duration of task in comparison to medium and long duration. Furthermore, time perception in terms of ratio would be less with longer duration than short and medium duration during executive function task and coefficient of variation score would stable across all three durations.

METHOD:

Participants

Thirty five undergraduate and postgraduate students of Banaras Hindu University with normal or corrected to normal vision were engaged in the study. Participants with age ranged from of 20 to 26 years (M=21.51 years, SD=1.50) were included in the current study. Person with any known chronic illness or under medication were excluded from the study. A minimum 80% ±20% score of correct responses during practice session was kept as inclusion criteria for final session of study.

Apparatus:

The stimuli were developed using Cedrus^®SuperLab 4.5 (2010) software and presented on a Dell (Inspiron-3250) Intel i3 processor computer. The entire stimulus was displayed at the center of the screen against a grey background. The screen was viewed from a distance of approximately 30 cm.

Experimental Task:

Present experiment used Simon task for measuring participant’s subjective experience of time perception. Each trial of Simon task started with the fixation point, which was presented for 200 millisecond (ms) followed by the exposure of blank screen (300ms). A colored square was displayed for 500ms on either the left or right side of the screen after the blank screen. The trial ended with response screen with duration of 1000ms.

Participants were instructed to press left arrow when the red square displayed and right arrow when the blue square presented on the screen regardless of its spatial location. There were three varied duration i.e. short, medium, long, comprising of 18, 36, and 54 seconds, respectively during the experiment. The trials of all three different duration were randomized. After completion of the each duration a black square was displayed at the center of screen for subjective time estimation. Participants were asked to reproduce the time estimation for the each trail. A flow chart of Simon task is illustrated in figure 1.

Design:

A within subject design was used in the present study. Three different time durations (short, medium and long) were treated as independent variable, whereas time perceptions in terms of ratio, absolute error and coefficient of variation were treated as dependent measures. Each duration was presented six times in random order.

Procedure:

All the participant were made comfortable to lab environment and rapport was established. Informed consent and biographical information were taken from all the participants. After the demonstration, participants were provided practice session with three different durations (16, 32, 48 sec). Only those participants were allowed to participate in the main experimental session who secured 80% ±20% accuracy in the practice trial. Reproduction method was used for judgment of time perception.

RESULTS:

After the data collection all the data of time estimation score were transformed into derived measure representing absolute error, directional error (ratio) and coefficient of variation. It is a standard practice to express these measure as proportion so that all score should be on an identical scale. Mean scores and SD were calculated for all dependent measures. The data was further subjected to one way repeated measure analysis of variance (ANOVA).

Absolute Error Measure:

Absolute error scores show the proportional difference between objective clock time and estimated time, and it is used to assess the overall level of accuracy of time judgments. The absolute error score is an indicator of accuracy of time perception, higher absolute error indicates lower accuracy on time perception. The absolute error score was calculated by using the following formula:

Absolute error= |Reproduction Duration-Target Duration|/ Target Duration]

[AE=|R_d-T_d|/ T_d]

Mean comparison of Absolute error results revealed that accuracy of time estimation is better in short (M=.06, SD=0.21), in comparison to medium (M=.17, SD=0.21) and long time duration (M=.18, SD=.18) Further Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) result revealed the main effect of time duration on absolute error was found significant F (2, 68) = 17.48, p=0.001 (see figure 2).

Figure 2: Absolute error score as a function of time duration

Ratio Measure:

Ratio scores provided an index of the direction of errors, score below 1.0 is an indicator of underproduction and above represents over- reproduction of time perception. The ratio score was calculated by using the following formula:

[Ratio=Reproduction duration/Target duration]

The mean ratio scores results revealed that participants highly underestimated the time under longer duration (M=.83, SD=.18) in comparison to medium (M=.85, SD=0.17) and short duration (M=.94, SD=0.21). The ANOVA result was found significant for ratio measure F (2, 68) = 17.46, p=0.001 (see figure 3).

Figure 3: Ratio score as a function of time duration

Coefficient of Variation (CV) Measure:

The third measures of time perception is Coefficient of Variation (CV) index which represent the variability in temporal judgments. The Coefficient of Variation score was calculated by using the following formula:

CV=SD (each participants)/Mean (each participants)

Mean score of coefficient of variation revealed that variation in temporal judgment was found similar across short (M=.18, SD= .12), medium (M=.22, SD=.15) and long (M=.16, SD= .11) duration of time perception. The ANOVA result of Coefficient of variation index was not found significant, F (2, 68)=2.19, p=.12 (see figure 4)

Figure4: CV score as a function of time duration

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION:

The aim of present study was to examine the effect of varied temporal interval on time perception using prospective judgment paradigm during executive task. The findings of the study revealed high accuracy of time perception during short time duration in comparison to medium and longer time duration.

High underestimation of time perception was found under longer duration (54 Sec) as compared to medium (36 Sec) and short (18 Sec) duration of task. The findings are in line with previous research outcome where participants underestimated more under longer duration than shorter durations task (Block and Zakay 2006; Duzcu and Hohenberger, 2014). Duzcu and Hohenberger (2014) also claimed that effect of the secondary task on time estimation are more reflective in longer duration. In the results of absolute error analysis, it was found that inaccuracy in time estimation increased when the duration increased. These findings supported previous experiments (Brown, 1985, Fortin and Rousseau, 1987, Duzcu and Hohenberger, 2014, Yadav et al., 2018).

The findings can be further explained in terms of attentional gate model (Zakay and Block 1995). According to this model a mental pacemaker regularly generates pulses to measure time, when individuals directs attention to a particular course of time a gate opens and accumulate pulse in cognitive counter. Whenever attention is distracted by secondary task the gates remains closed and pulse are not accumulated which leads to distorted time estimation. It means when we are busy our attention is on the task, not on the time which causes distortion in time perception. Further the study conducted by Van Rijn and Taatgen (2008) explain this effect by the non-linearity of time scale. The executive task causing fewer pulses to be counted in the accumulator influence longer durations highly compared to medium and shorter time duration.

The findings of the current study also revealed that minimum error was found in prospective judgment of time perception under short duration, whereas longer duration was highly underestimated. Therefore on the basis of current study finding it can be concluded that human reproduce short durations more accurately than medium and longer time duration.

The outcome of present study suggest different issues, which may be considered by future researcher like use of different executive load (low and high load) as well as different task modality (sensory and visual) for direct comparison between task properties.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT:

Authors acknowledge and thank the UGC Research Fellowship and Indian Council of Social Sciences Research, Government of India, New Delhi for providing financial support for this study.

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Received on 30.04.2019 Modified on 12.05.2019

Res. J. Humanities and Social Sciences. 2019; 10(2):542-546.

DOI: 10.5958/2321-5828.2019.00089.5