Brain, sleep and memory · 1 min read
Videos with more movement can feel longer
Adults estimated video durations. A program that added up image changes reproduced some of those trends, but not every estimate.
The study, in plain language
The clock says the same amount of time, but a walk through a busy city and a quiet office scene can feel different in length. To study this, the team showed natural videos to young adults, asked them to estimate each duration, and recorded where they looked.
Duration estimates varied with the visual content of the scenes. A program that accumulated image changes reproduced some broad features of those responses. Interestingly, it had been fitted to clock-measured durations, not people’s estimates, yet similarities appeared between the two patterns.
The key idea
Felt duration varied with what happened on screen, and a program that added up image changes reproduced part of that pattern.
Something to think about
The next time a video feels unusually long, compare that feeling with what the clock says and notice how much the image changes.
The original study
Activity in perceptual classification networks as a basis for human subjective time perception
Source under CC BY 4.0. English adaptation and explanation by PaperFlow, with AI assistance. The text has been reorganized for a general audience; it is not the complete paper and does not imply endorsement by its authors.
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