A COMPUTERIZED PROCEDURE FOR DEVELOPING AND ADMINISTERING TIME PERCEPTION PROTOCOLS - APPLICATION TO A SAMPLE OF ADULTS AND ADOLESCENTS

The principal goals of this work are: (a) To describe an integrated co mputerized procedure for designing, administering, and recording time perception experiments (more specifically, reaction time and time esti mation) on human subjects; (b) To present the results of applying this procedure to the study of fourteen normal adolescents and fourteen no rmal adults. Individualized time perception protocols can be designed with this menu-driven highly interactive computer-program. Such protoc ols can then be used for testing experimental subjects. The programs r un on any IBM-compatible computer, and the resulting test data are sto red in ASCII format. As an example of the use of this procedure, react ion time with five regular and irregular preparatory intervals (PIs), and time estimation of 10 s with and without feedback was measured on normal adolescents and adults. For short PIs the adolescents had react ion times (RTs) similar to adults, but significant longer RTs than adu lts for long PIs. In the case of time estimation no differences betwee n the two groups were observed; however, both groups underestimated ti me when no feedback was provided; that is, they thought that less time had elapsed than really had.