Overestimation of time as an indicator of surprise

Abstract

well established indicator of surprise is the interruption of current activities, commonly examined within the domain of response-time tasks. Since surprise is supposed to suspend any activity, it was investigated whether this assumption holds true also for timing tasks. Participants of an experiment repeatedly produced time intervals of different durations. After a series of time productions, an unexpected event was presented which was assumed to temporarily stop the timing process and, hence, should lengthen the times produced. As hypothesized, time productions were longer in the surprise conditions than in the non-surprise conditions, with an amount of lengthening which was independent of times produced.