Time Perception - Illusions of Time

Illusions of Time

A temporal illusion is a distortion in sensory perception caused when the time between the occurrence of two or more events is very short (typically less than a second). In such cases a person may misperceive the temporal order of the events. The kappa effect is a form of temporal illusion verifiable by experiment whereby time intervals between visual events are perceived as relatively longer or shorter depending on the relative spatial positions of the events. In other words, the perception of temporal intervals appears to be directly affected, in these cases, by the perception of spatial intervals. The Kappa effect can be displayed when considering a journey made in two parts that take an equal amount of time. Between these two parts, the journey that covers more distance will appear to take longer than the journey covering less distance, even though they take an equal amount of time.

The stopped clock illusion, where the seconds hand of a clock appears to freeze in place when initially looked at, is another illusion of time perception. Later it was found that saccadic eye movements could cause compression of time as well as space. Terao, Watanabe, Yagi, & Nishida (2005) were able to show that reducing the visibility of a flash by means of dimming was sufficient in reducing time interval estimation. Taken together these findings suggest that when vision is tainted in some way, as in the case of a saccade when vision is blurred or in the case of a dimmed flash when the flash is harder to identify, that time perception is also affected.