Seeing a large number of objects can actually make time feel shorter depending on how the brain is asked to track it.
Large numbers of objects make time feel compressed in reference-free tasks, contradicting a long-standing rule of perception. Scientists previously believed that high numerosity always stretched the perception of time, making it feel longer. This new research shows that the direction of this effect depends entirely on how the task is framed to the participant. It reveals that the brain's link between quantity and duration is much more flexible than once thought. This finding forces a major rethink of how humans process the fundamental dimensions of the physical world.
Beware Bisection: The Direction of Time-Numerosity Interactions Depends on Objective Reference
research_square · rs-9499006
Abstract In time perception studies, one of the most commonly employed tasks across humans and animals is temporal bisection. In this task, subjects must classify intervals presented into “short” and “long” duration categories. Crucially, this classification can be done either in reference to explicitly learned “anchors”, or in a “reference-free” mode in which no anchors are provided and the subject must use an implicit standard – the so-called “partition variant”. Previous work has demonstrated