A User-Friendly Framework for Measuring Short Duration Interval Time Perception

Psychophysics experiments are a well established means of measuring time perception. However, the accuracy and precision of such measurements highly depend on the task, experimental context, and platform used to conduct the study. Here, we review common psychophysics tasks for prospective and retrospective time perception studies, as well as factors to consider when designing and running prospective time perception experiments. We then present a high-precision framework for short visual time perception experimentation in MATLAB using Psychophysics Toolbox. The framework incorporates different metrics of participant response within the time reproduction and comparison paradigms for prospective time perception studies, including sample analyses in R. The framework is available in a free, downloadable MATLAB package to encourage accessibility to higher accuracy platforms for time perception research.