Awareness of attention allocation and time estimation accuracy

Abstract

Subjects performed a psychomotoric task and gave a prospective verbal estimate of its duration. One group of subjects was then made aware of optimal division of attention between the psychomotoric task and the passage of time, and again performed the task and prospectively estimated its duration. It was found that the accuracy of the time estimation markedly improved for that group of subjects relative to a control group whose awareness of the division of attention was not raised. Implications for understanding time estimation processes are discussed. © 1989, The Psychonomic Society, Inc.. All rights reserved.