A watched pot sometimes boils: a study of duration experience

The ‘watched pot’ phenomenon — the lengthening of duration experience when one is attentively and perhaps impatiently waiting for some event to occur — was studied in three experiments. In them, each observer attended for a duration of 270 sec to a liquid-containing beaker on an electrical burner. Observers who were told that the experiment concerned time perception (prospective paradigm) reproduced the duration as longer than those told that it concerned visual perception (retrospective paradigm). In the prospective paradigm, reproductions were longer if the liquid did not boil than if it did, and an interruption (task-unrelated questioning) shortened reproductions if the liquid did not boil but had no effect if it did. In the retrospective paradigm, if there was boiling or questioning or both, reproductions were longer than if there was neither. Results have implications for hypotheses about duration experience.