AsianScientist (Jul. 22, 2011) – Clocks tell time in numbers – and so do our minds, according to a new study that will be published in the journal Psychological Science.
In two experiments, scientists found that people associate small numbers with short time intervals and large numbers with longer intervals – suggesting that these two systems are linked in the brain.
“It’s clear that time and numbers are related in daily life. Numbers are used to represent distance and size, and to go to a farther place usually takes a longer time,” said Denise Wu, a researcher at the National Central University of Taiwan and a co-author on the study.
Wu explains that these domains were treated differently in psychology because the tradition is to manipulate one key variable of interest while controlling other confounding variables as much as possible.
Towards understanding how time and numbers are associated, Wu and her coauthors came up with a way to look at how numbers interfere with people’s perception of time.
In one experiment, each participant sat in front of a computer screen while a single-digit number appeared on the screen for less than a second. After the number disappeared, the word “NOW” appeared on the screen, and the participant was supposed to press a key for as long as they thought the number had been displayed. The correlation between time and number was clear: after seeing a large number, like 9, people held the key down for longer than they did for a smaller number, like 2.
In another experiment, people saw a green dot for a short time. When they were asked to press the key, a number also appeared on the screen. In this case, they held down the key longer if they saw a small number and for a shorter time if they saw a large number. Wu thinks that happens because the small number makes people think they haven’t held down the key for long enough yet.
“We are really excited about this because this means the influence of the number is so automatic and immediate,” Wu says.
According to Wu, the results suggest that the brain somehow processes time and numbers together – possibly even with the same neurons. So, maybe instead of having different parts of the brain devoted to different kinds of measurement, some part of the brain is generally responsible for thinking about magnitude, she said.
Our perception of time may also be influenced by emotion, says Wu. For example, time passes more slowly in a boring meeting than when we are chatting with a friend, she says.
“It shows that it’s not like, mentally, we have a clock and it is immune to all the other information,” Wu says.
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Source: Association for Psychological Science.
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