title: Time flies faster if a person has a high working-memory capacity.
abstract: Attention affects the perception of time, and the ability to control attention is reflected in measures of working-memory capacity. Individuals with low working memory capacity have more difficulty maintaining focus on a task than high-capacity individuals, particularly when faced with contextual distracters. This experiment examined the effect of working-memory capacity on the perception of temporal duration while performing a cognitive task. We predicted that low-capacity participants would be more likely to direct attention away from the cognitive task and towards the contextual distraction of time, and consequently perceive temporal duration more accurately, and perform the cognitive task less accurately, than high-capacity participants. The results showed that when performing both tasks simultaneously, low-capacity participants were less accurate than high-capacity participants on the cognitive task, but were more accurate on the timing task. High-capacity participants, conversely, were more accurate in the non-temporal cognitive task at the cost of monitoring duration.
authors.affiliation: Northern Illinois University, USA.
authors.forename: James L
authors.initials: JL
authors.lastname: Woehrle
authors.forename: Joseph P
authors.initials: JP
authors.lastname: Magliano
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D055641:Mathematical Concepts; D008570:Memory, Short-Term; D013998:Time Perception; D055815:Young Adult