Attentional Effects on the Subjective Passage of Time While Driving

Accurately keeping track of time is indispensable in everyday live, yet being distracted alters subjective durations. It has been hypothesized that distracted attention decreases the speed of temporal processing. Therefore, when reproducing earlier learned durations, distracted participants tend to overreproduce them. However, other studies show that this effect is driven by not enough attention being directed to the temporal information around the time a response is required. Furthermore, most studies test these hypotheses using laboratory experiments that do not always capture the task demands and temporal dynamics of real-world behavior. The current study investigates timing behavior during a ecologically valid task: driving a car in a simulator. Participants simultaneously perform an interval reproduction task while the difficulty of the driving task is dynamically manipulated. We hypothesize participants will overreproduce intervals when the driving task becomes more demanding, but mainly when the demanding periods occur towards the end of the intervals. This would indicate that responding based on a subjective representation of time is affected when driving becomes more difficult, but not neccesarily the subjective representation itself.These results will further inform us about the dynamics of distorted subjective time in ecologically valid settings