Please go to the following link and listen to this discussion on the perception of time. Ordinarily I provide questions to guide your reposnes on these sorts of assignments, but I will leave it up to you do decide how you want to respond. It would be good if you visited an additional site ontheperception of time and bring that ito your discussion.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=121753441
Let me know if you have any questions.
This segment on NPR discussed the theory of “Time fly’s when you are having fun.” They did a study where students entered a room without any form of time displayed. Half of the students were told that this task should take twenty minutes. The other half was told the task would last five minutes. The students were then asked to underline words on a paper that had reappearing letter such as apple. The study showed that the students who felt the time went faster had a more positive reaction than those who felt the task took a longer time. The second study had students pick a song and listen to it. While the song was playing the timer on the screen ran fast. The students believed that song was shorter than it really was and had a more positive reaction than those who had the clock run slowly. They also tested students with earplugs doing the first task. Researchers mentioned that the earplugs would effect their perception of time. After the task those students who believed it was the ear plugs related their satisfaction to the earplugs and not time itself. They also made the correlation between how people always say their weekends or vacations were too short. This then shows that they enjoyed their time and time seemed to fly by.
I found a video of an experiment on perception of time during a free fall. This video related time perception to adrenaline instead of just pleasure. Adrenaline relates to how our reflexes work. They give the example of after being in a car accident the people report it seemed like everything was happening in slow motion. The people who did the free fall estimated their fall time as twice what it actually was. So, in this case time had slowed down. Their adrenaline made the fall seem longer.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bG6nZY9Bxy0
The NPR did a talk show on “Time Flies When You’re having Fun”. Researchers brought college students into a lab and took away all their forms of telling time away. They were given tasks; each group had to spend a certain amount of time on those tasks. When they came in and told the students they were done were surprised at the amount of time taken for the tasks. The groups working on the shorter time limit thought that the time lasted forever whereas the people working longer thought that the time flew by. Researchers then asked the students how much they enjoyed the tasks and found that those who found the task somewhat excited thought that time really flew and vice versa. The question then became could they control the amount of fun they were having when already doing a fun task. The researcher concluded that when participants were surprised at the way time flew they assumed that they must have been having fun.
One site that I saw briefly talked about the perception of time from an interesting point of view. The author says that the way we fill our time says a lot about our individual personalities, attitudes, and philosophy. http://www.perceptionoftime.com/
This experiment manipulated people’s perceptions of time during an activity. It was based on the saying “time flies when you’re having fun.” They found that people’s perception of enjoyment was also manipulated if time was “sped up” or slowed down. Although everyone was given the same boring task, some people thought they were obviously having fun if time seemed to go quickly while underlining letters. The participants were stripped of any cues of time besides their own personal moods and internal clocks. When we don’t have other clues, we have to look to any hints we can find to decide on time. Participants also listened to their favorite song which was presumed to be an enjoyable experience for them, which made time feel as if it was going faster. When I was thinking about this experiment, I thought about my own personal experiences. I know for example I have been confused many times when I’m sleeping if I don’t have a clock to help me gauge how tired I should be, or if the sun is up or not and if I should wake up. We all look to little clues to help us make sense of stimuli.
The article I found discusses that anticipation of an event can also change how we perceive time. The example the article gives is the anticipation for Christmas. It seems like time moves slowly up until Christmas because we are so excited, then Christmas day seems to fly by. Exam dates however seem to creep up on us suddenly, which I have noticed myself as a college student. Our mood and affect change how we interpret things around us, for example if we assign a positive or negative interpretation. The researchers say that time seems to have a certain elasticity that bends and changes given an event. I thought this was an interesting way to look at time since we have exact measurements of it. In reality, time is exact but how we perceive it changes.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/6851323/Mood-affects-perception-of-time-passing.html
Aaron Sackett recently did some experiments to see if time goes by faster when we’re having fun. He knew that having a good time was not the only factor in time being sped up. Other influences like caffeine or a rush of adrenaline also influence our perception on time. Sackett ran an experiment where college students would come in and have their cell phones turned off and their watches taken away; they were told that it was so they could concentrate better. They were given a text and were assigned a task to complete with the reading. They were going to do this task for exactly ten minutes. The part of the group that thought they were only going for five minutes thought that it took forever to complete the task and had less fun with the experiment. The group that thought they were going for 20 minutes though that the experiment went by fast and enjoyed it more than the other group. An implication that Sackett gave for these results was if something was so much fun then you are more likely to remember the event. Or if something comes fast then that means it must have been a pleasant experience for them.
A website that I found about perception of time talks about how we can change how we perceive time in order to become more productive and less rushed. The first step was to see how we perceive time. Next, we analyze our time perception. You can take an assessment “Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory” and get a score. If you have a score above the average score of 3.5 then you are a future-oriented person; this means you avoid temptations and distractions that are time wasting. These people will likely feel as if they have worked hard and become successful at something that really wasn’t worth it leaving them with a sense of meaningless of their life’s worth. The last step is changing our perception of time. You can teach yourself to control your perception and how it impacts every aspect of your life.
http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2010/03/16/how-to-control-your-perception-of-time/
I am not going to give a summary on this "Time Flies" segment. We all listened to it, there's no need to repeat it again. I thought this experiment was interesting. We can all relate to it when we go home on winter, spring, and summer breaks. However, in some instances, if we are bored, time can seem to go by fast. An example I thought of was sleeping. We aren't necessarily having 'fun.' We are enjoying it though. But the idea of 'fun' is different than doing a simple task. Here is a video on the Time Paradox: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3w33up3JKPk
This animated cartoon is enjoyable, much more than a lecture on the time paradox. It discusses the marshmallow study. Children are given a marshmallow. If they wait long enough, they can get another marshmallow and then eat them both. If they eat the first one before they are told to, then they do not get another one. I never thought of this study as being related to time. Either way, it would seem to get boring after a while of waiting for the person to give you a second marshmallow. If you ate the first one, then your time would be up, so it would seem like time flew by. Maybe those who played with the marshmallow (moving it around, smelling it, etc) sped up time in their mind because they preoccupied themselves by playing, instead of thinking when the next marshmallow would come. If I were given an opportunity to participate in a marshmallow study, I would try to sleep, then time would fly :)
The saying “time flies when you’re having fun”, is a very common saying. Ever since I was little I believed this saying to be true, when I was at my friends house I couldn’t ever be there long enough, but when I was at the dentist it seemed as if I was there for days. Researcher Aaron Sackett decided to look at the implications of this common saying. He wanted to find out if the perception of the time flying by would change your perception on how much fun you were having on that particular task. It is very hard to measure the “sense of time” obviously time is the same speed constantly, but all of our perceptions of time can be different and very difficult to measure. Things like coffee and caffeine can impact how fast or slow we perceive time as passing, and busy people with high energy perceive time differently than more relaxed people. I never thought about it before, but the perception of how fast or slow time goes can definitely manipulate how fun or torturous you perceive the task to be. Sackett and his colleagues did many tests to see how this may affect time perception. They found that the perception of enjoyment of a task effect how they perceived the time. If they found the task to be torturous (they had participants listen to a sound that they found annoying) then the time would slow, if they found the task to be enjoyable (they had the participants listen to their favorite song) then the time appeared to ‘fly by’. During these studies the researchers stripped the participants of any cues that may tell them what time of day it was or how much time had passed. They also manipulated the time by speeding it up or slowing it down. The found that participants would attribute the time moving faster to them enjoying the task and the other way around. When the researchers made them wear ear phones and made subtle hints that this may affect the perception of time, people were more likely to attribute the headphones to their misperception of the time. I found a youtube video about perception of time and free falling. This is research being done in Dr. Eagleman’s lab; they pilot free fall experiments to explore time warping in high adrenaline situations. When people are in car accident they perceive the time to slow down. They wanted to look at the effects of adrenaline on time perception. They created a 150 ft free fall to judge this. He wanted to see if our brain becomes more effective when it has a shock such as falling from a high level. Their ability to gauge time when they were falling was significantly slowed. They marked that it took twice as long for them to fall as it really did. Time appeared to slow when they were falling because their brain was on a hyper active stage. This is very interesting research and I will be very curious to see how it turns out. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bG6nZY9Bxy0
The NPR story was interesting in that I have always felt that time goes faster when I am enjoying myself, but I didn’t realize that people could be tricked into perceiving the activity as more or less enjoyable based on the manipulation of time perception. Of particular interest was the way subjects could be inoculated by wearing earplugs which reminded me of how the placebo effect works on the brain. The mind is a strange, wonderful, and little understood place! I guess we are learning more an more all of the time!
For the divergence task, I found a blog article called “Vision Shift Glasses Alter Time Perception” at http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2009/07/vision_shift_glasses.html. This article is interesting in that it explains a study which found that subjects who wore prism glasses that skewed everything to the right perceived events to be longer in time, and those who wore the glasses with left skew perceived events to be shorter. The study suggests that our perception of time is spatially linked internally. The full implications of this are yet to be understood, but it does remind me of the way in which we have to use motion to make visual associations work. These are things that we don’t think of being linked in our perceptions of the world. A full text article of study referenced in blog is available here: http://pss.sagepub.com/content/20/8/949.full
After listening to this discussion on the perception of time, I started thinking about my own issues with perception of time. I have ADD and have always struggled with time management. It is normal for most people to feel like time is going by faster when they need to get something done and slower when they are waiting to do something. For me, and others with ADD, these distortions of time are multiplied. When I (finally) sit down to do something it takes me much longer than others to get it done. If I want to get something done on time I have to start it way ahead of time. This does not always work because other distractions keep me from beginning on time. I feel like I'm always late. When I'm bored it class, I get really restless and time feels like it's dragging. I have doodles all over my psych stats notes because I’m so bored (don't tell Hitlin).
There have been many, many times in my life where I plan to leave at a certain time and if I do I then realize I'm either going to be very early or very late. I wonder to myself, "Why would I think that time was a good time to leave?" For some things I do, if I'm really determined to get it done, I can become super focused and get the task done very quickly.
Time perception is different for everyone depending on the situation. The discussion on NPR talked about time flying when you're having fun. I think time flies when you're keeping busy or when you don't give yourself a good amount of time to complete a task.
I also have read that your adrenaline or endorphins can impact how you perceive time. When people are in pain, time can seem to pass slowly. When I have a headache I feel like it lasts forever even if it really only lasts for 30 minutes. I don’t know why but when I'm waiting in line to ride a rollercoaster and watch the ride it seems like a much longer ride than when I am actually on the rollercoaster.
Time perception is very interesting and I plan to find out more about time management.
This article discusses the connection between the amount of time that has passed and how much fun we think we are having, similar to the saying “time flies when you’re having fun”. People are aware of this, for example time seeming shorter when you’re on vacation, or time seeming longer when you’re bored, but at the University of St. Thomas, Aaron Sackett found that when people think that when time goes by faster, they are enjoying themselves more than when it goes slowly. They conducted two studies. The first involved having people do a task where they looked through words to find words with double letter combinations for ten minutes. Some of the participants were told that they were going to be doing this for five minutes, and some were told that they would be doing it for twenty. Those who thought that they were going to be working on it for five minutes felt that time was going slowly and rated the experience as less enjoyable as participants who had also done the study for ten minutes but were told that it would take twenty. The second study they did involved having people listen to a song that they liked, and there was also a timer on the music player. The timer either sped time up or slowed it down while the participants were listening to it. When the participants thought that time was going quickly they rated the song more positively. They also found that this misperception of time affected how unpleasant they found something to be, when they thought that time had sped by, they didn’t think it was bad as if they thought that time had drug on. When Sackett gave some participants earplugs and told them it might have an effect on how they perceived time, those who felt that time went quickly did not think that the task was more fun, but simply thought that time had gone by because of the earplugs that they were wearing.
http://www.skidmore.edu/~hfoley/Time.htm
This website looks like it was prepared for another class on Sensation and Perception. It gives some information on time and how we perceive it. One part of this website that I thought was interesting was the characteristics of the Time Experiencer section. This section talked about how we all have our own biological clock, which helps us keep track of time without the use of clocks or watches. Our biological clock is how we can wake up, without an alarm clock. Most days I wake up a couple minutes before my alarm goes off, and I kind of get mad because those were a couple minutes that I could have spent sleeping, but that it just my biological clock working. The passage of one day and sort of how we perceive this passage of time can be explained with our circadian rhythms, which rely heavily on the change from light to dark throughout the day. Not only humans have these cues, but most organisms. One example of this was we always used to feed my dog at 5 p.m. and so every day at around 4:45 he would start getting antsy and get excited to be fed. Some research suggests that the area of the brain that controls a person’s biological clock is located near the optic chiasm, which would use the sun as a trigger mechanism. If a person lived in a cave for an extended period of time, and couldn’t use the sun as a cue for what time it was, a person’s biological clock would reset to approximately 25 hour days rather than 24.
Another interesting thing that this section mentioned was the our culture is obsessed with knowing what time it is all the time. People lead busy lives and want things to be fast and efficient. One study was done that measured different time spans of events like the speed that bank tellers could make change, the speed that postal clerks worked, how fast pedestrians walked and what proportion of these pedestrians wore watches, and it was found that Northeastern America tends to be more face-paced and time concerned than Westen States. Also there was a positive correlation between the pace that people live their lives and death due to heart disease (living more fast-paced lives tends to lead to more stress).
This segment discussed the article, "Time flies when your having fun". The did a study where college students entered a classroom and and were asked to do a task. Half of the students were told that this task would be done in 5 minutes and the other half were told it would take 20 minutes. They were told to read a text and underline all words with double letter combinations like "apple" or "mammal". After five minutes the students were informed that the study was over. For participants who thought their task was going to last 5 minutes had a negative experience, but the students who thought the task would take 20 minutes repored that it was a very positive experience. They also mentioned that people always say that their vacations were too short because they were having so much fun! I found a website that talks about the perception of time and gives an example of a person tapping an object, and then tapping it again five minutes later and hearing a different sound because the person percieves that there is an interval beween the first and second sound. This doesn't exactly relate to the article that we read, but it is still a good example of perception of time!
http://www.islamicity.com/science/quranandscience/relativity/GeneratedFiles/ThePerceptionofTime.htm
Everyone has probably heard or used the old saying, "Time flies when you're having fun." Although it may sound like just a silly statement, new evidence shows that the old rhetoric may be true. Aaron Sackett of the University of St. Thomas wanted to see if he could increase one's perception that they were having a good time simply by manipulating the the amount of time the participant believed he or she had spent on a simple word identification task. To do this, Sackett "focused on speeding up or slowing down the perceived, or felt, passage of time from the individual's perspective." Participants were brought into the lab and removed of all cellphones and watches. They were then told to read a passage and underline all words with double letter combinations, like "tree" or "fatty." Each participant worked on this task for ten minutes, then were told to stop by the experimenter. Although each participant spent exactly ten minutes on the task, some were told that they had spent only five minutes on the task while others were lead to believe they had spent 20 minutes on the task. Sackett found that those who believed they had spent twenty minutes on the task reported the time to have "flown by," and reported the task to be more fun, enjoyable, and overall more positively than those who believed they spent only five minutes on the task. Individuals lead to believe they spent only five minutes on the task reported time as "dragging on," or passing more slowly and rated the task as less enjoyable and more negatively overall.
Sackett then added another facet to his study. He wanted to see if he could make fun things seem like even more fun. To do this, Sackett repeated the experiment, but this time allowing the participant to listen to their favorite song during the task. When the participant believed that time had flown by and they were listening to their favorite song, they rated the task as much more positively than they would have without the song playing.
Sackett believes there to be grand implications for this research. He states that we will remember a vacation as more enjoyable the faster it seems to fly by. This could be carried into other areas; children in school may find the activities more enjoyable if there is some way to manipulate their perceived passage of time, which might result in more adherence to rules and and increase the desirability to learn.
I found an article that generalizes the idea that time flies when you're having fun into "Time flies when you're busy." Researchers at the University of Alberta conducted an experiment that required participants to perform seven different item-location tasks, each varying in level of difficulty, then estimate how long it took them to perform each task. Results indicated that the harder the task became, the less time participants believed themselves to have spent on it. Researchers attribute this to an extreme disparity in prospective and retrospective time estimations, which makes it very hard to guess how much time has passed if one was fully engaged in an attention-consuming task.
Here's the article:
http://www.expressnews.ualberta.ca/article.cfm?id=5985
Interesting stuff. most of the stuff i've read about the perception of time has to deal with time "slowing down" when someone finds themselves in a life threatening situation. we have all heard of this sort of reaction and most of us agree with the notion that it is one of those neat things that goes along with our fight or flight reaction and is our built in safety net to be able to act in situations of such extreme stress. the NPR bit is different in that it looks at the enjoyment of an activity and perception of time passing. time does fly when youre having fun! I checked out another article that goesinto differnt theories of how exactly our brains track time. we don't have little internal clocks, however, bees are able to tell time. heres the link: http://4mind4life.com/blog/2008/07/23/time-perception-how-the-brain-controls-time/
the article is interesting and i think it does a pretty good job of explaining how our brains process time. neat stuff.
The fact that time goes by when we are having fun is do to the concept of perception. In the study they use a clock that was speedup up, as a manipulation which compared the between liking sounds and something or not liking something. What I have noticed as I have gotten older time fly's. By taking this class in sensation & perception I am starting to look at things in a different light; such as using the sense to see, to ear, and to smell different things in another view. I have struggled with time management as I get involved in public relations. if you put you 100 present into what you believe in as a just cause. So this semester I have struggled the stability of time as well as maintaining time managements.
I was actually just thinking about this concept a few days ago because I was sitting in class and the time was dragging on but after I got home the time seemed to go by so much faster. After listening to this NPR story, it got me thinking about how the perception of time can be manipulated in many different ways. Our brain and perception of time can be tricked into thinking that time is actually going faster when in fact time never speeds up or slows down. As I was researching the internet to find more information about the perception of time I found a youtube video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTx8BBr5wZ4)about the perception of time and whether it speeds up or slows down with age. The guy asked individuals ranging from age (young individuals and older individuals) and had them count how long a minute was. The younger individuals counted to fast however; the older individuals all counted too slow. Therefore; the interpretation of perception of time can be construed in a number of ways. Perception of time dramatically changes how we see the world and although time never speeds up or slows down, we perceptually think that it does whether we're having fun, or whether we're growing older, time never changes even though we seem to think it does.
I thought this was pretty interesting because I can most definitely relate to it because I experience it in almost everything I do. When it is something I enjoy then time seems to fly by so fast and when it's something I don't like or enjoy then time passes by so freakin slow that it seems literally painful sometimes. LOL. I found an article on this same topic that I really enjoyed reading. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/6851323/Mood-affects-perception-of-time-passing.html
This article relates to time perception. It uses
the phrase "a watched pot never boils", it seems to take forever to pass.It talks about how if you're dreading an event creates anxiety and this means you put it out of your mind and this has the effect of "contracting time".
When a person anticipates an event that generates a positive emotion, say spending the next holidays on a sunny beach in the Bahamas, they may experience impatience and she may feel these longingly awaited holidays will never arrive.
The anticipated duration expands. On the other hand, if this same person faces a negative event such as a difficult exam, she may feel anxiety and time seems to fly until this event.
The interview centered around the common cliché “time fly’s when you’re having fun” which suggests that when we are enjoying ourselves time seems to be moving faster than when we are bored or not enjoying ourselves. The research question was, can they change people’s opinions about whether or not they were enjoying themselves, by manipulating the length of time people believe they have spent on a given task. They achieved this result by lying to the participants. They performed a couple of different experiments. First they had spectators perform a dull task of underlying words with double-letters under the impression that they would continue doing this for 10 minutes. Although everyone performed the task for 10 minutes, half the participants were told they would be performing the task for 5 minutes and the other half that they would perform the task for 20 minutes. Naturally for those in the 5 minute group the time seemed to last forever. Conversely those in the 20 minute group perceived that the time had literally flown by.
Similarly they allowed people to listen to either enjoyable or dull music with a timer that was controlled to either run faster or slower than actual time. In all conditions when time was sped up such that they believed a longer time had elapsed than was actually the case they enjoyed the music more (or disliked it less in the dull category). This shows an interesting angle to the relationship between perceptions and reality. It seems only natural that whenever a good thing is finished we will wish that it would have gone on longer. Similarly with a bad event, whenever it is over we wished that it would have been for a shorter time period.
It would seem that while doing something we enjoy we would be more attentive and have a higher state of arousal. Whereas when we are bored we would be less attentive and less aroused. It seems equally likely to me that due to the increased arousal and attention good things would be more easily remembered, and create stronger reactions within us when thinking about them. Why does this not cause us to think that they also must have taken up a larger time interval than situations where we were inattentive and less aroused? Obviously this is not at all how we experience time.
http://www.unisci.com/stories/20011/0227013.htm
This website explains a few areas of the brain that are now thought to be involved in the perception of time. Areas in the parietal lobe and the basal ganglia, long known to be impaired in patients with Parkinson’s or ADHD who commonly experience distortions in the perception of time, are now thought to partially cause our experience of time. They tested this hypothesis by using fMRI while asking participants to judge whether the time in between two initial tones was greater or less than the time between two subsequent tones. The speed of the new fMRI technology allowed them to find out which areas of the brain were activated just during the initial two tones, when the participant should be thinking only about time.
I am an big fan of NPR and I never miss a 'Science Friday' with Ira Flatow. Talk radio is an obsession of mine... This study was very cleverly executed. Everyone can relate to the feeling of time moving faster or slower in relation to our perception of the task we are busy doing. I am a butcher at a local grocery store so I am very use to monotonous tasks that take a long period of time. To improve my work day I have conditioned myself to not look at the clock for hours, but since I also enjoy my job, time seems to move very quickly when I keep myself busy.
This study has a lot to do with a concept in Humanist psychology called "flow". In layman's terms it's the experience of being caught up in a task so much that you loose track of time or any stimulus outside of what you are completely focused on. (Link for more exact description)-> http://jhp.sagepub.com/content/25/4/79.abstract Painters and musicians experience this frequently. The task being carried out obviously affects a person's perception of the time being spent, but this study ingeniously shows that the perceived time itself can also play a big role in how a person feels about the task.