Time speeds up when you are having fun. But it slows down, it turns out, when one looks at something worth remembering. According to a research, people's sense of how fast time passes can be influenced by the memorability of the images in front of them.
A team led by Martin Wiener, a cognitive (认知) neuroscientist at George Mason University in America, tested how visual stimuli change people's experience of time. They showed several dozen participants images of different scenes—from empty box rooms to filled stadiums—for between 300 and 900 milliseconds. After each one the participants had to say if the time spent looking at the image was short or long. Their responses showed that, when the images featured large scenes, such as an empty warehouse, more time seemed to have passed.The opposite happened when the images were of spaces jammed with objects, such as an overfull garage.
That was strange. Previous research has found that the experience of stretched time increases with size; for instance, if people are flashed images of different numbers for equal lengths of time, they think the higher numbers are shown for longer. But the jammed scenes seemed to contradict that trend. To see if something else was at play, the researchers ran another experiment using pictures that differed in memorability. Humans better remembered pictures focused on people, actions and centrally placed objects. Dr. Wiener's team used images from a 60,000-image data set, where each image had been judged on its memorability (a man with flowers in his beard: memorable). The more memorable the image, the more it seemed to stretch time.
Exactly how processing speed leads to different time perception (理解) is still unclear,but the researchers believe the connection lies in how the brain prioritises incoming information.
