Non-magnitude sources of bias on duration judgements for blank intervals: conceptual relatedness of interval markers reduces subjective interval duration

We report three experiments in which the events flanking a temporal interval were either related or unrelated, based on overlap in the letter identity of single letters (Experiment 1), in the conceptual congruency of color words and colored rectangles (Experiment 2), or in the conceptual congruency of sentence stems and their terminal words (Experiment 3). In all cases, we observed a bias for participants to judge the duration of temporal intervals as shorter when the flanking events were related. We draw an analogy between these temporal judgement distortions and those reported elsewhere (Alards-Tomalin et al. in J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn 40(2):555–566, 2014) that revealed that the similarity in the relative magnitude of flanking events generate the same type of bias on duration judgements. The observation that non-magnitude dimensions of relatedness between flanking events can also bias duration judgements raise questions about the applicability of two influential theoretical frameworks for understanding the distorting effects that non-temporal stimulus dimensions can have on duration judgments, A Theory of Magnitude (Buetl and Walsh in Philos Trans R Soc B Biol Sci 12:1831–1840, 2009, Walsh in Trends Cogn Sci 7:483–488, 2003) and the Conceptual Metaphor Theory (e.g., Lakoff and Johnson in Philosophy in the flesh: the embodied mind and its challenge to western thought. Basic Books, New York, 1999). In our general discussion, we consider a number of alternative frameworks that may account for these findings.