Spatiotemporal predictability alters perceived duration of visual events: Memento effect revisited.

Abstract

Does event perception alter perceived duration? Previous research has shown that the perceived duration of a short scene depicting a disk moving along a segmented path is reduced when the temporal order of the motion segments is reversed (Memento effect). This effect has been attributed to the idea that reversed segments give rise to the perception of distinct visual events, whereas continuous segments are perceived as a single event. It has been suggested that the reduction in perceived duration is a result of perceiving multiple distinct events rather than 1. Here, the authors replicate and investigate the origin of the Memento effect. In 4 experiments, they explore the role of the spatiotemporal predictability of the disk's movement as well as the influence of the number of discrete events on perceived duration. Controlling for spatiotemporal predictability eliminates the Memento effect; however, controlling for the number of distinct events does not. Thus, the authors' results suggest that violations in spatiotemporal predictability rather than a varying number of discrete events induce the Memento effect. The authors discuss the impact of these findings for the perception of more naturalistic events.

Effects of learned episodic event structure on prospective duration judgments.

“…Effects of stimulus predictability, which sometimes lead to opposite correlations with the number of segments, may depend on encoding difficulty and/or the segmentation strategies adopted. It is possible for example that stimuli that are easier to structure are judged shorter than stimuli that are harder to segment because of violations of prior expectations (Block et al, 2010; Liverence & Scholl, 2012; Meyerhoff et al, 2015; Schiffman & Bobko, 1974; Zakay et al, 1994). Differences in the role of event structure in prospective duration judgments may therefore stem from the structural analyses performed during encoding and its relation to prior knowledge, indicating a role for semantic memory and prior knowledge rarely considered in the literature.…”

“…Similarly, other studies have shown that violations of prior expectations, which require some form of stored knowledge in semantic memory to make predictions, also modulate prospective judgments (Boltz, 2005). Interestingly, in contrast to the number-of-songs effect above, some studies have shown that more segments in the stimuli led to shorter judgments, rather than longer, albeit under different task demands (Liverence & Scholl, 2012;Meyerhoff et al, 2015). In any case, it appears that memory mechanisms-and in particular, the influence of prior knowledge on the episodic encoding of an individual experience-play a role in prospective judgments, although the nature of these mechanisms and their relation to task demands remain unclear.…”

Modality Influences Perceived Film Suspense But Not Time Perception

“…Additionally, the semantic structure of films also influences psychological processes (Huff et al, 2014). Intervals containing event boundaries (i.e., time point at which observers perceive a boundary between two meaningful units of time; Zacks et al, (2007) are generally judged to be longer than intervals with the same duration without event boundaries (Bangert et al, 2020;Meyerhoff et al, 2015). The presence of event boundaries varied in the film clips in our study due to their origin from actual films for high external validity.…”