Experience of Duration as a Function of Number of Responses,Task Difficulty,and Sex

Abstract

Subjects (40 men and 54 women) judged the duration of a 250-sec. interval during which they engaged in one of four free-association tasks. The tasks were to give one common response, two common responses, one original response, or two original responses to each of 25 stimulus words presented at 10-sec. intervals. Contrary to previous research, the easy tasks (giving common responses) resulted in shorter estimates of duration than the hard tasks (giving original responses). Subjects giving one response to each stimulus word did not give longer estimates than subjects giving two responses per stimulus word. Males gave shorter estimates of duration than females in the low-response tasks; the sexes did not differ in the high-response tasks.