“Humans systematically overestimate short time intervals.”

In Experiment I, subjects administered the feedback version of the temporal reproduction task exhibited central tendency with overestimation of short durations and underestimations of long durations. Similarly, in Experiment II, subjects exhibited central tendency with overestimating short time intervals and underestimating long time intervals.

Results indicated that, when arithmetic was used as the initial task, Ss underestimated the duration of the initial interval. When arithmetic was used as the reproduction task, Ss overestimated the duration of the initial interval.

Duration judgments at short intervals are subject to several types of illusions. For example, perceived durations can be distorted by saccades, by an oddball in a sequence, or by stimulus complexity or magnitude. Larger, brighter, and higher numerosity stimuli were all perceived to have a longer duration than equal-length stimuli of smaller magnitudes along those axes.

One example comes from the widely reported finding that novel stimuli ('oddballs') have longer subjective duration than repeated items. This finding has been found in numerous experiments using diverse techniques, and is robust enough to be regarded as a standard 'temporal illusion'. However, time perception is highly labile across changes in experimental context and task, and there are pronounced individual differences not just in overall performance but in the use of different timing strategies.

A critical contextual calibration is the central tendency effect, which leads to overestimating short intervals and to underestimating long ones. The only studies, using temporal reproduction paradigms and short time intervals (less than 10 s), have found an overestimation of temporal durations while walking, speculating that movement speeds up the internal clock.

Research shows that if observers pay attention only to time without performing any other mental task, they tend to overestimate the durations. This is consistent with the central tendency effect, which leads to overestimating short intervals and underestimating long ones. However, the more difficult a concurrent task, the more individuals tend to underestimate the time, suggesting that cognitive and motor systems compete for the same resources.

A 2023 study involving approximately 24,500 participants found that subjective and objective time were linearly related, with participants overestimating intervals shorter than 14 minutes and underestimating intervals longer than 16 minutes. These findings suggest a systematic overestimation for shorter durations and underestimation for longer intervals.

Humans possess the capability to make judgments about the relative duration of time intervals with accuracy and precision, but this capability has limitations. A PSE (Point of Subjective Equality) value shorter than the standard interval indicates that the comparison interval is more often perceived as longer than the standard, reflecting an overestimation bias.

New research reveals that observing different visual stimuli can significantly distort the human perception of time. In findings published in Nature Human Behaviour, research psychologists from George Mason University discovered that viewing more prominent and memorable scenes can create the impression of time moving more slowly. Conversely, cluttered imagery compresses time perception, making it seem to speed up.

A 2020 study suggests that a distorted sense of time can be caused by 'tired' brain cells. If the brain is adapted to a certain duration, exposure to a stimulus *shorter* than that adapted duration can lead to an *underestimation* of time, while a longer stimulus leads to overestimation.

Our perception of time is influenced by factors such as our environment and how we feel about the task that we might be currently undertaking. “People often say: 'time flies when you're having fun', and this is sort of true,” says ChronoPilot project coordinator Argiro Vatakis from Panteion University in Greece. “The same five minutes can feel longer when we're bored. This is due to the cognitive processes involved in time perception.”

One of the earliest descriptions of this phenomena, Vierordt's Law (Vierordt, 1868), states that in retrospect, tasks of short duration tend to be overestimated, whereas tasks of long duration tend to be underestimated. Short tasks, those less than 5 min, are more likely to be overestimated.

In three experiments, 469 subjects watched a short videotape of a bank robbery and later estimated the duration of the tape. Subjects invariably overestimated the durations. Females overestimated to a greater degree than males.

The central tendency bias is exhibited when participants are asked to judge a set of durations. Shorter durations are often overestimated and long durations underestimated. Reproducing a given auditory interval usually leads to an overestimation. The timing of the motor system may be slower than the auditory or visual clocks, leading to consistent over-reproduction.

The findings from 18 comparisons in the second part of the study suggest a negative correlation between time-based prospective memory and time perception. The findings, which are considered in relation to theoretical explanations of time-based prospective memory, point to several avenues for future study.

According to a March 2025 article, ultradian rhythms, such as the 90-minute Basic Rest-Activity Cycle, influence time perception. During the active phase of this cycle, individuals are more likely to overestimate short time intervals, a phenomenon potentially linked to increased cognitive activity and arousal levels.

Recent research from December 2022 suggests that healthy adults may perceive time as passing slower than it actually does, leading them to overestimate the duration of 60 and 90-second time intervals. In contrast, patients with orbitofrontal cortex lesions and borderline personality disorder were more accurate in their estimations.

The human ability to accurately estimate time intervals in the order of 0 to 20 seconds can be explained by two seemingly incompatible theories: the internal clock and the attentional counter theory. According to the attentional counter theory, if there are other processes competing for attention, the counter is increased less often, “stretching” time, which can lead to a shorter reproduced interval (underestimation) or a longer interval (overestimation) depending on when the demanding task occurs.

Both anecdotal accounts and experimental evidence suggest that people underestimate how long it will take them to complete future tasks. A possible reason for this tendency is that people remember task durations as shorter than they actually are, leading to underestimations when predicting future times.

We need to go back as far as 1977, when two psychologists - Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky - came up with the concept of the so-called planning fallacy. They looked into how people were able to predict the length of time it would take them to perform a given task by observing individuals who, as optimists, underestimated the amount of time it would take them to accomplish their projects.

Time perception is the human mind's subjective experience of the passage and duration of time, influenced by various factors including psychological, environmental, and neurological elements. The 'oddball effect' demonstrates that when the brain processes something unusual, it requires more time, leading to the perception that the 'oddball' stimulus stayed on the screen longer, thus overestimating its duration.

Many theories of time perception, such as the internal clock model, propose that our subjective experience of duration is based on an internal pacemaker-accumulator system. The rate of the pacemaker can be influenced by various physiological and psychological factors, leading to distortions in perceived time. When the pacemaker speeds up, more 'pulses' are accumulated, leading to an overestimation of elapsed time, and vice-versa.