Measuring Time
Do posts that start or end with smart quotes feel smarter? I'll leave you to answer that but start with a quote from Einstein anyway: "Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. THAT'S relativity." One of the fun parts of working as a Design Researcher is thinking deeply about how people perceive things. Time is one of those things. With interactivity and flow being such an integral part of today's applications this becomes even more important. So this week I'm spending some time trying to understand perceptions of time and what an experiment design to measure some of the questions I am interested in might be. One interesting thing I learnt about were the two classic theories of time perception: 1. The Internal Clock Model 2. The Attentional Gate Model The internal Clock model roughly underlines the fact that humans/animals are capable of learning the temporal structure ...