Changes in the experience of time: The impact of spatial information on the perception and memory of duration

Although it is understood that our experience of time is fluid and subjective, the cognitive mechanisms underlying this phenomenon are not well described. Based on event segmentation theory, we tested the hypothesis that changes in the context, particularly the spatial context, of an experience impact how an individual perceives (encodes) and remembers the length of that event. A group of participants viewed short videos of scenes from movies that either contained shifts in spatial context (e.g., characters moving through doorways) or did not contain any shifts in spatial context. In one task, participants estimated a randomly selected time duration (between 10 and 23 s) when encoding these videos. In a second task, the same participants estimated the duration of the videos after viewing them. We found that even though the presence of spatial shifts impacted how time was perceived, the nature of this effect differed as a function of task. Specifically, when time was estimated at encoding, these estimates were longer for videos that did not contain spatial shifts compared with those with spatial shifts. However, when these estimates were made at retrieval, durations were reported as longer for videos with spatial context shifts than those without. A second experiment replicated these main findings in a new sample. We interpret these results as providing new evidence for theories on how context changes, particularly those in spatial information, distort the experience of time differently during the encoding and retrieval phases of memory.