CONTROLLED ATTENTION SHARING INFLUENCES TIME-ESTIMATION

A seminal attentional model of time estimation predicts that subjectiv e duration will be positively correlated to the amount of attention gi ven to temporal processing. This prediction holds under prospective co nditions, in which one is forewarned that judgements of time will be a sked, in contrast to retrospective conditions, in which such judgments are required after the relevant period without any prior warning. In three experiments, an attention-sharing method was used. Subjects were asked to control the amount of attention that they devoted to one or the other component of a dual-task paradigm. The first experiment invo lved word categorization and reproduction of duration. The following e xperiments, based on signal detection theory, required discrimination of both the duration and the intensity of a single stimulus, in the vi sual (Experiment 2) or the auditory (Experiment 3) modality. The resul ts indicate that when the attention is directly controlled by the subj ect, the subjective duration shortens as the amount of attention devot ed to the temporal task diminishes. The implications of these results for the possible existence of an internal timer are considered.