By Nora Bradford
I remember the first day during quarantine when I woke up, went outside to walk my dog, and realized I had no idea what day it was. It wasn’t just a momentary blip. As quarantine progressed, time started zipping by: I’d often lose track of the hour, day, or even the month. But now, as the world tiptoes out of the pandemic, my days are packed and time is slowing back down. Did my perception of time actually change during quarantine or did it just seem that way?
A recent study in Applied Cognitive Psychology has some possible answers. Researchers tracked more than three hundred Scottish residents as they went from living under the strictest of lockdown restrictions, when leaving the house was only allowed for essential reasons, to nearly full reopening. As we might expect given our own experiences during the lockdown, cognitive functioning — including working memory, attention, learning, and decision-making — generally improved as restrictions were lifted and social interaction increased.
What was surprising, though, was how the quarantine affected participants’ ability to gauge time.
Using a time-estimation test, Joanne Ingram, a lecturer in the School of Education and Social Sciences at the University of the West of Scotland, and her colleagues measured how accurately participants could tell when small increments of time had passed. In the task, participants were asked to press a button when a certain increment of time — between half a second and 4 seconds — had passed.
Usually, if people are going through a challenging period in their lives, time seems to drag. Yet Ingram and her colleagues found the opposite happened during the pandemic. While in lockdown, participants tended to press the button slightly after the increment of time was over, meaning that they experienced the time passing faster than it actually was. This was true whether participants lived alone or with others.
As restrictions eased, participants seemed to experience time slowing down — they tended to press the button prematurely.
While Ingram is still studying the reasons for this altered view of time during the pandemic, she used her experience of a road trip to help explain the lockdown’s possible effect. On a recent eight-hour car ride, she felt that the time was passing relatively quickly compared to a normal eight hours that she might spend on a normal day. “If you think of all the things you can do in that time if you weren't in the car,” she said, “those same eight hours can actually seem really long when you're doing lots of things.”
Though this might seem surprising given that “time flies when you’re having fun,” a similar result was seen in astronauts after landing on Earth. In a 1988 study, astronauts in a 1985 Space Shuttle flight overestimated brief time intervals of 2 seconds while nearing the end of their journey and immediately after landing. The relaxation and relief that comes with a mission accomplished may be to blame for the temporal confusion. As restrictions ease and life returns to normal, our post-quarantine brains might be in mission-accomplished mode.
Nora Bradford: I'm a second-year cognitive science Ph.D. student at UC Irvine where I study metacognition and learning. I also write for a science podcast and do freelance science writing on the side. You can follow me on Twitter @norabradford or visit my website.
This story was produced as part of NASW's David Perlman Summer Mentoring Program, which was launched in 2020 by our Education Committee. Bradford was mentored by Cameron Walker.
Main image: Now that our calendars are filling up again, each day feels fuller -- and longer. Credit: Anete Lusina
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