How duration, difficulty, and boredom impact prospective and retrospective passage of time judgements and duration estimates

Time perception research often involves asking people to estimate how long a task took to complete. Their estimate accuracy is then compared with the actual task's duration (an approach known as duration estimation). This method is commonly used for brief tasks and underpins several theories of psychological time. The present experiment aimed to explore additional ways of capturing the experience of time under varying conditions. An in-laboratory experiment was conducted in which 841 participants engaged in a visual and memory search task. Participants were assigned to either a prospective condition (told that they would estimate the task's duration) or a retrospective condition (were not told that they would estimate the duration). The difficulty and duration of the task were manipulated. Interestingly, task difficulty did not affect any measures of time perception. Moreover, these passage of time judgements did not correlate with duration estimates, suggesting that they may reflect different aspects of time perception. However, confidence ratings varied with estimation accuracy, suggesting that participants had insight into their time distortions. Additionally, engagement and boredom influenced how fast or slow time felt, but these affective states did not affect duration estimates. These findings reveal a disconnect between the subjective experience of time's passing and the accuracy of time estimation, highlighting the complexity of temporal experience. OPEN PRACTICES STATEMENT: This study was not preregistered. Derived subject-level data supporting the findings of this study are available online ( https://osf.io/bxy43/overview ).