Time Is Not What It Used to Be: Children and Adults Shown to Experience Time Differently - Neuroscience News

While we can argue why one summer may appear longer than the other and how the perception of time can compress and dilate durations depending on various factors, we can easily set up an experiment to gain more insights.

One video consisted of a rapid succession of events (a policeman rescuing animals and arresting a thief), and the other was a monotonous and repetitive sequence (six shady prisoners escaping on a rowing boat).

When watching a captivating movie, the mind is completely immersed in the story because the sequence of actions unfolds so fast that one does not have time to think about anything else, such as life, work, or a to-do list.

Hence, the two types of heuristics explain the bizarre switch at about age 7 and the persistent bias that the boring meetings appear longer than they are, which stays with us for the rest of our life.

Time is a uniquely human yet culturally ubiquitous concept acquired over childhood and provides an underlying dimension for episodic memory and estimating durations.

The tendency to represent temporal durations with a horizontal hand gesture was evident among all three groups, with an increasing prevalence with age.