Background music as a quasi clock in retrospective duration judgments

The segmentation-change model of time perception proposes that individuals engaged in cognitive tasks during a given interval of time retrospectively estimate duration by recalling events that occurred during the interval and inferring each event's duration. Previous research suggests that individuals can recall the number of songs heard during an interval and infer the length of each song, exactly the conditions that foster estimates of duration based on the segmentation-change model. The results of a laboratory experiment indicated that subjects who solved word-search puzzles for 20 min. estimated the duration of the interval to be longer when 8 short songs (