ArticlePsychological science2025
An Illusion of Time Caused by Repeated Experience.
Article in Psychological science, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
What it found
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- The Spatial Representation of Self-Referential Negative Events.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Central tendency biases in temporal memory: extending Vierordt's law to sequential order and distance judgments under emotional contexts.Psychological research · 2026Article
- Repeated Viewing of a Film Clip Changes Event Timescales in the Brain.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- Distortions of space and time in and around objects and events.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Review
- Repeated Viewing of a Narrative Movie Changes Event Timescales in The Brain.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
How do people remember when something occurred? One obvious possibility is that, in the absence of explicit cues, people remember on the basis of memory strength. If a memory is fuzzy, it likely occurred longer ago than a memory that is vivid. Here, we demonstrate a robust illusion of time that stands in stark contrast with this prediction. In six experiments testing adults via an online research platform, we show that experiences that are repeated (and, consequently, better remembered) are counterintuitively remembered as having initially occurred further back in time. This illusion is robust (amounting to as much as a 25% distortion in perceived time), consistent (exhibited by the vast majority of participants tested), and applicable at the scale of ordinary day-to-day experience (occurring even when tested over one full week). We argue that this may be one of the key mechanisms underlying why people's sense of time often deviates from reality.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.