Color and time perception: Evidence for temporal overestimation of blue stimuli.

2017

The perceived duration of a visual stimulus depends on various features, such as its size, shape, and movement. Potential effects of stimulus color have not been investigated in sufficient detail yet, but the well-known effects of arousal on time perception suggest that arousing hues, such as red, might induce an overestimation of duration. By means of a two-interval duration discrimination task in the sub-second range, we investigated whether participants overestimate the duration of red stimuli in comparison to blue stimuli, while controlling for differences in brightness (individual adjustments by means of flicker photometry) and saturation (colorimetric adjustment in terms of the CIELAB…