Scientists have discovered that the perceptual experience of images not only determines how well they are remembered but also influences people's perception of how much time has passed while viewing them. The findings may shed light on how time is perceived and challenge the concept of a "universal internal clock." The relevant research was recently published in Nature Human Behaviour.
Time perception is a characteristic of human consciousness, yet the brain's ability to record and understand time has been relatively understudied. While some studies propose the hypothesis of an objective "internal clock," others have found that the nature of stimuli encountered by individuals directly influences their subjective perception of time.
Martin Wiener and colleagues from George Mason University conducted a series of experiments involving 170 participants. They first had the participants observe various images for different durations and then asked them to estimate how long they had been viewing each image. By combining these results with a neural network model, the researchers found that time perception is influenced by the nature of the images, such as scene size, the amount of clutter within the image (e.g., a cluttered pantry versus an empty warehouse), and how memorable the scene is.
Specifically, large scenes and memorable images (which are typically more novel to observers and differ more from other images) seem to cause time to "expand" — meaning that people perceive the time spent viewing the image to be longer than it actually is — while cluttered images cause time to "contract." The study also indicated that time and memorability mutually influence each other; people more accurately estimate the duration of viewing more memorable images, and images perceived as lasting longer are also more memorable.
Wiener and colleagues pointed out that these findings may contribute to understanding the relationship between human vision, memory, and time perception, while also challenging the concept of a universal internal clock. However, they concluded that further research is needed to investigate other objective features that may affect visual processing, such as texture.
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