The present study demonstrates a new phenomenon of psychological time. Twenty-two subjects participated in both the following experiments. In the first experiment, it was found that the temporal duration of a scene on a two-dimensional display simulating a three dimensional event in which an object is coming toward the perceiver was perceived to be shorter than the duration of a scene simulating an event in which the object is going away from the perceiver. This result is hypothesized to be due to the inconsistency between the expected movement and the actual movement, which is induced from the reduction of cues for depth perception in the 2-D display simulating a 3-D event. In the second experiment testing this hypothesis, it was found that in a 2-D display simulating a 3-D event, the ending time of the event was estimated to be earlier in simulations of an oncoming object than in simulations of a departing object.

Key words: time perception, time estimation, motion perception