Study On Spatio - Temporal Fluctuation Patterns Of Psychological Time

The primary aim of this study is to reveal the instability of psychological time. Two sections of experiments are carried out. In the first section, subjects are instructed to continuously produce a predefined interval of some given length to reveal the fluctuation of psychological time. In the other section, subjects are asked to reproduce the duration of cursor's movements to study the effect of motional characteristics on psychological time.Special software is designed to generate all the stimuli and manager the data on the computer. 32 subjects are involved in this study.The first experiment explores the effect of feedback, length of interval, and gender on the produced time. The results ndicate that:a) The continuously produced time is fluctuant.b) Feedback has significant effects or the accuracy of subjects'estimation, and errors are reduced a great lot after feedback.c) The estimation of the predifined intervals of 3s and 5s is significantly diffirent from the estimation of 2.5s and 6s.d) Gender has effects on time estimation. The female subjects tend to overestimate the intervals more than the male subjects.The second experiment explores the effect of shape, direction and duration of cursor's movements on the reproduced time.The results indicate that:a) The effect of shape of movements on time estimation is significant But the reproduced time of standard lines arcs and chords is not significantly diffirent.b) The variable of duration has main effects on the repreduced time. The accuracy and standard deviation increase with the growth of length of intervals.c) The direction of movements effects the reproduced time. When the cursor is moving from left to right or from up to down, subjects reproduce the duration more inaccurately than from right to left or from down to up. But the standard deviation is lower in he former two directions than in the latter ones.