ABSTRACT
The experimental study of time perception has a long history in psychology, and researchers have approached the problem from many different viewpoints. A different approach to manipulating attention in dual-task timing situations is to employ the attentional sharing procedure in which subjects are instructed to devote specified amounts of attention to concurrent tasks. Expectation of an upcoming event leads to a heightened temporal awareness as attention is increasingly drawn to the passage of time. One straightforward way to manipulate temporal awareness is to explicitly direct subjects' attention to the passage of time. Pacemaker-accumulator models are based on the idea that neural pulses constitute a biological substrate for temporal experience. The interference effect refers to a disruption in timing performance when subjects must attend to the passage of time and simultaneously perform a demanding distractor task. The interference effect may be explained by reference to an attentional allocation model.
