Judging Passage and Passing Judgment: From Distrusting the Present to an Error Dynamics Account of Passage of Time Judgments
Review of Philosophy and Psychology June 17, 2026 Darius Parvizi-Wayne, Rasmus Pedersen, Jules Rankin
People often judge whether time is passing quickly or slowly, yet the brain mechanisms behind these judgments are poorly understood. A leading explanation from predictive processing theory suggests that the speed of experienced time depends on how rapidly the perceptual system abandons its current hypothesis about the present. This account fails to explain existing experimental data and has internal flaws. An alternative theory proposes that the sense of time moving quickly arises when the cognitive system unconsciously detects that it is reducing prediction error faster than expected; time feels slow when prediction error is reduced slower than expected. This new model is internally consistent and can account for key empirical findings.