Scientists prove time flies when you're busy
August 6, 2004 - Any mom or dad can tell you that keeping children busy helps stave off cries of boredom--and now there is scientific backing to prove it.
Dr. Anthony Chaston and his research colleague, Dr. Alan Kingstone, have proven, once and for all, that time really does fly when you're having fun. Or, at least, it flies when your attention is engaged.
Working in the University of Alberta Department of Psychology, Chaston and Kingstone devised a test that required subjects to find specific items in various images--a sort of "Where's Waldo" activity. However, before the subjects started, they were told that once they had completed the test, they would be asked to estimate how much time had passed.
There were seven levels of difficulty among the tests. In some cases, the items were easy to find because they were different colours, or they were set among just one or two other items. In the more difficult tests, the items were placed among many similar-looking objects, or didn't exist in the image at all.
"The harder the search tasks were, the smaller the estimates became," said Chaston, whose study is published in the latest edition of Brain and Cognition. "The results were super clean--we have created a new and powerful paradigm to get at the link between time and attention."
Chaston became interested in the psychology of time estimation after he took up caving as a hobby. Chaston and his friends would explore caves in the Rocky Mountains for hours at a time. When they returned to daylight, they would have no idea how much time had passed.
"I developed a test among my friends in which we all took our watches off before going in the caves, and then we all tried to estimate how long we were in there," Chaston said. "The amount of error was enormous. In some cases the actual time in the cave was six hours, but people would guess around four."
There are two kinds of time estimations, Chaston added. Prospective time estimation means the estimator knows in advance that he or she will be asked to make a guess about time after a task is completed. The second type is retrospective estimation, which means someone has been asked to provide a time estimate after the task has been completed.
"There's generally a big difference between prospective and retrospective time estimations," Chaston said. "In our society, we're pretty good with prospective estimates. Most of us wear watches, and anyway, we're pretty good at keeping track of the time in our minds because we have to, for most of our regular daily lives."
For this reason, Chaston is pleased his study demonstrated that attention, as it relates to prospective time estimates, has such a powerful effect.
"This really shows that even if you know in advance that you're going to have to estimate the time of a task, the more attention the task requires, the faster time flies."
Related link – internal
The U of A Department of Psychology website: http://www.psych.ualberta.ca/
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by Tom Foughty
Apr 16, 2006
