Abstract
Across a lifetime, each person encounters a vast miscellany of visual stimuli. Some of these images stick firmly in our memories, while others drift away with ease. This distinction lies in an image’s memorability, an intrinsic quality that is steady across observers despite individual differences (Bainbridge, 2019). At the same time, images have the potential to grab our attention in a way that makes time fly by, or they can feel everlasting. In this experiment, we sought to uncover the relationship between image memorability and the perception of time passing, asking whether memorable images seem to last longer or shorter than their forgettable matches. To investigate the differential effects of image memorability on the perception of time, participants (N = 30) on Amazon Mechanical Turk were shown a total of 80 randomly ordered images for a range of durations, and were asked to mimic the durations of these images by holding down the space bar for the same duration. Each subject viewed 40 image pairs, consisting of memorable and forgettable stimuli in a variety of scene categories (including natural/manmade and indoor/outdoor scenes), and each memorable–forgettable pair was assigned one of eight durations, ranging in equal intervals from 500 ms to 4000 ms. It was observed that participants generally overestimated image durations below 2000 ms and underestimated durations above 2000 ms. The results of our study also suggest a trend in which highly memorable images produce shorter participant responses than their less memorable counterparts. Deeper investigation into these images promises to reveal the specific factors that drive the perception of time. Thus, in our most memorable settings, time is fleeting more than ever.