Changing rates of reinforcement perturbs the flow of time

This experiment tested the hypothesis that changes in rate of reinforcement affect the rate of an internal pacemaker as suggested by the Behavioral Theory of Timing (BeT: Killeen and Fetterman, 1988). Pigeons were trained to discriminate durations of 10 s and 20 s, and then exposed to higher or lower rates of freely delivered reinforcers. When returned to the discrimination task, judgments were reliably biased in the predicted directions: those returning from a richer context judged standard durations to be longer than did those returning from a poorer context. These results validate a key assumption of BeT, and provide an explanation of how changing tempos of life bias the perception of time.