The Influence Of Event Segmentation On Duration Perception

Duration perception refers to the cognitive progressing of the stimuli time,and is the focus of researches on time cognition.Researchers are mainly interested in the difference between the objective and subjective time duration as well as the accuracy of time estimation.Event segmentation refers to the process of parsing the ongoing stream of information into meaningful units.The event segmentation occurs at the early stage of cognitive processing,and has an effect on following processing.There have been several researches investigating the relationship between event perception and duration perception,which has raised the memento effect:sequences that were segmented into distinct objects over time were perceived as subjectively shorter.However,no consistent conclusions of the mechanism have been reached yet.Some researchers attributed the effect to the perception of several events,while others argued that the effect came with the disruption of spatiotemporal continuity at event boundaries instead of event itself.Investigating the features and mechanism of the memento effect will help provide new evidence of the relationship between event perception and duration perception,as well as improve the theoretical models of time perception.The current study included four experiments.Experiment 1 replicated the experiment of memento effect and confirmed the effect,which served as the basis of the following experiments.Experiment 2 changed the moving object to control event perception,instead of disrupting the spatiotemporal continuity.The results showed that multi-event caused shorter duration estimation.Experiment 3 further controlled the object continuity by changing the luminance of object instead of identity,and got the same results as Experiment 2.Experiment 4 controlled the event perception but changed the spatiotemporal continuity,and there were no difference on duration estimation,which indirectly proved that events could affect duration perception.According to the results,the following conclusions can be reached:(1)The memento effect is stable and repeatable;(2)The perception of multi-event can shorten the subjective time estimation;(3)The difference on time estimation is not caused by the disruption of spatiotemporal continuity.As a result,the memento effect is induced by the perception of multi-event instead of the spatiotemporal continuity at event boundaries.Event perception can influence the duration perception.