The Feelings Of Elapsed Time In Yitzhak Rabin's Perception

People commonly express elapsed time as a subjective sensation or feeling. For instance, when returning to a restaurant, one might remark, “It feels like we were here ages ago.”
People
express such feelings even for meaningful events whose actual date of occurrence is known. For example, on a recent trip to the memorial of former Israeli Prime Minister
Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated in 1995, the wife of the first author of this article observed that Rabin’s assassination felt like it had occurred recently, whereas the 1995 birth of her twins felt very distant. In this article, we examine the feeling of elapsed time, a naturally occurring judgment based on
“intuitive information about distance” of an event (Friedman,
1993, p.62). We focus
Prior research on time perception has focused on the first category. For example, events that are more accessible in memory (Brown, Rips, & Shevell, 1985) or more emotional (Bratfisch, Ekman, Lundberg, & Kruger,
1971) create stronger traces in memory than less accessible and less emotional events. Strong memory traces lead to forward telescoping, the tendency to estimate dates as more recent (Friedman, 1993; Morwitz, 1997). Other work suggests that contextual cues about an event can be used to reconstruct its placement in time (Friedman, 1996). Remembering that one was wearing a heavy coat, for example, indicates that the event occurred in wintertime. Similarly, general event knowledge and metacognitive beliefs may also be used to judge time. For example, people reconstruct the durations of specific military conflicts, epidemics, and other events by using their knowledge of the typical duration of these types of events
(Burt & Kemp, 1991). Metacognitive beliefs about the causal relationship between events also influence perceived duration
(Faro, Leclerc, & Hastie,
Prior research suggests that characteristics of an event itself can affect the estimated date of its occurrence. Our work differs in that we focused on how characteristics of the time interval following an event affect people’s feelings of elapsed time (i.e., their feelings of how distant an event seems). We argue that a time interval that is punctuated by a greater number of accessible intervening events related to the target event (event markers) will make the target event feel more distant, but that unrelated intervening events will not have this effect. In three studies, we found support for the systematic effect of event markers. The effect of markers was independent of other characteristics of the event, such as its memorability, emotionality, importance, and estimated date, a result suggesting that this effect is distinct from established dating