Time Flies, People Perceive Time and Space as if They're Moving into the Future

It may be true that time flies, but how exactly do humans perceive it? According to a recent study, people experience time as if they're moving into the future and away from the past.

New research suggests that some illusions that influence how we perceive movement through space also influence our perception of time, and these findings of our experiences of space and time have changed what some researchers have previously thought.

The research, conducted by psychological scientist Eugene Caruso of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and colleagues, is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

"It seemed to us that psychological scientists have neglected the important fact that, in everyday experience, people don't evaluate the past and the future in exactly the same way," says Caruso.

Researchers note that people feel closer to objects they are moving toward than those they are moving away from. This includes, for instance, objects that are exactly the same distance away.

Because our perceptions of time are grounded in our experiences of space, Caruso and his colleagues hypothesized that the same illusion should influence how we experience time, resulting in what they call a temporal Doppler effect.

They surveyed students and commuters at a train station, finding that people perceived times in the future (i.e., one month and one year ago) as closer to the present than times in the past, such as one month or year ago.

Similarly, participants who completed an online survey one week before Valentine's Day felt that the holiday was closer to the present than those who were surveyed a week after Valentine's Day.

These findings hint at the relationship between movement in space and perceptions of time.