Memorable images make time pass more slowly

A team led by Martin Wiener, a cognitive neuroscientist at George Mason University in America, tested how visual stimuli alter people’s experience of time. They showed several dozen participants images of different scenes—from empty box rooms to filled stadiums—for between 300 and 900 milliseconds. After each one the participants had to say if the time spent looking at the image was short or long. Their responses revealed that, when the images featured large scenes, such as a vacant warehouse, more time seemed to have passed. The opposite happened when the images were of spaces cluttered with objects, such as an overfull garage.