Time Perception: How Do Environmental Factors Interact with Individual Differences to Influence Judgments of the Passage of Time?

Time perception is essential to everyday functioning. Yet, accuracy when judging the passage of time can be determined by several factors, pertaining to the environment (e.g., music, rapidly repeated auditory or visual stimuli) and to the individual (e.g., neurological conditions, such as schizophrenia). Very little is currently known about how these factors may interact. Over 100 participants completed the short O-LIFE questionnaire which measures schizotypy — a set of personality traits related via physiological processes to schizophrenia. They then carried out a classic temporal bisection task, judging whether each of seven interval durations were short or long. Following this baseline task, participants completed the temporal bisection task again, but this time each interval was preceded by a 5-second click train. Although the click train manipulation led all participants to judge time intervals as longer compared to baseline, it was significantly less effective for participants scoring high in schizotypy. The results are discussed in the context of two dominant theories of time perception—scalar expectancy theory and attentional gate model and their predictions regarding the operation of an internal clock.