Memorable beginnings, but forgettable endings: Intrinsic memorability alters our subjective experience of time

Abstract

Time is the fabric of experience–yet it is incredibly malleable in the mind of the observer: seeming to drag on, or fly right by at different moments. One of the most influential drivers of temporal distortions is attention, where heightened attention dilates subjective time. But an equally important feature of subjective experience involves not just the objects of attention, but also what information will naturally be remembered or forgotten, independent of attention (i.e., intrinsic image memorability). Here we test how memorability influences time perception. Observers viewed scenes in an oddball paradigm, where the last scene could be a forgettable “oddball” amidst memorable ones, or vice versa. Subjective time dilation occurred only for forgettable oddballs, but not memorable ones–demonstrating an oddball effect where the oddball did not differ in low-level visual features, image category, or even subjective memorability. But more importantly, these results emphasize how memory can interact with temporal experience: memorable beginnings may put people in an efficient encoding state, which may in turn influence which moments are dilated in time.