Attention allocation policy influences prospective timing

The role of attention allocation policy control in prospective duration judgments was tested in two experiments. In the first experiment, it was demonstrated that prospective duration judgments of same clock durations are longer when timing is treated as a primary task than when it is treated as a secondary task, regardless of the difficulty of the nontemporal task filling the to-be-judged interval. In the second experiment, this finding was replicated. Additionally, it was demonstrated that when prospective timing is not preassigned a specific priority, duration judgments are longer than those obtained under secondary-task conditions, but shorter than those obtained under primary-task conditions. It was also revealed that when attention is distracted from timing, prospective duration judgments become shorter than when attention is not distracted. These findings support the notion that prospective timing creates a dual-task condition in which magnitude of duration judgments reflects the amount of attentional resources allocated for temporal information processing.