Drew Schoenfeld¹, Hee Yeon Im¹, Joan Danielle K. Ongchoco¹; ¹The University of British Columbia

In order to act in the world — to be in the right place at the right time — visual processing must keep track of time. Psychological time though is malleable, with the same duration seeming longer or shorter, depending on external factors (e.g., how many events occurred) or internal processes (e.g., speed of information processing). But we do not only passively perceive time; we can also make things go faster or slower depending on whether we wait and let time pass, or move things along ourselves. This agency, or the role of the “self” in relation to time, has been often isolated through the following question: “If your Wednesday meeting is moved forward by two days, when is the new meeting?” If you are *moving* toward the meeting (i.e., “ego-moving”), the answer is Friday. If you are *waiting* for the meeting to approach (i.e., “ego-stationary”), it’s Monday. Here we ask whether and how these self-time perspectives change temporal experience. Observers saw an event — a disc flash on a screen. As in typical duration experiments, they reproduced time intervals (i.e., the time elapsed between the start of the trial and the event) via button press. Critically, they also reproduced intervals with their “self” as the reference point (i.e., the time elapsed between now [where you are in time] and the past event). In a large-scale study, ego-moving observers (who reported “Friday”) reproduced shorter durations between themselves and the past event, than did ego-stationary observers (who reported “Monday”) — while no difference was observed for reproductions of intervals between events independent of the “self.” Thus, ego-moving people may be more “ready to act,” so past events are represented as having occurred more recently in time — perhaps because these are still deemed relevant for impending future action.

Acknowledgements: This work was supported by the Hampton Research Grant awarded to J.D.K.O. and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Discovery Grant to H.Y.I.