Something as random as a song’s length could determine whether you miss an important deadline or arrive late for an appointment, research suggests.
The study, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, shows that people rely heavily on time estimates of past experiences to plan for future tasks. In addition, outside influences, such as background music, can skew our perception of time, causing even the best-laid plans to go awry.
Listening to four short songs, as opposed to two long songs, such as “Shout” by The Isley Brothers (4:80) and “Ray of Light” by Madonna (5:35), can fool young people into over-estimating how long it took to complete the same 11-minute task, new research suggests.
“Our results suggest time estimates of tasks that we need to incorporate into our later plans, like a drive to an appointment, are often based on our memory of how long it took us to perform that same drive previously,” says Emily Waldum, principal author of the paper and a postdoctoral researcher in psychological and brain sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.
“Even if you think you estimated the duration of events accurately, external factors unrelated to that event can bias time estimates,” she says. “Something as simple as the number of songs you heard play on your phone during a run can influence whether you over- or under-estimate the duration of the run.”
In a complicated modern world where multitasking is the norm, it’s easy for our game plans to fall apart due to breakdowns in “prospective memory,” a term psychologists use to describe the process of remembering to do something in the future.
COURTESY: DAILY MAIL
