Abstract: People’s duration estimation is not accurate and is influenced by many factors. Some researches suggest that the anchors concerning different time periods influence subjects’ predictions of future task duration; in other words, there is an anchoring effect in the process of predicting task duration. Longer time anchors lead to larger estimates, and shorter anchors lead to smaller estimates. All the past studies are centered on time predictions, but the present study was designed to investigate how time anchors affect subjects’ estimations of experienced durations, and to explore the impacting mechanism.
Sixty-three undergraduates participated in the experiments. The participants in the two experiments were presented with time anchors having different values and units (e.g., 1 s, 1000 ms, 5 s, and 5000 ms). Thirty-nine participants volunteered to participate in experiment 1, which involved the use of the verbal estimation method. All the participants were asked to estimate the temporal durations under different anchor conditions (2 s, 4 s). Experiment 2 had 22 volunteer participants and involved the use of the production method. The participants were required to produce the durations corresponding to the time anchors. All the participants were tested individually on computers, and each session lasted for 20~30 minutes. An analysis of variance was then conducted after the data were logarithmically transformed.
The experimental results revealed that the value of the time anchors significantly affected the participants’ duration estimates. When the participants were shown a longer time anchor, the duration estimations were larger, and when they were shown a shorter time anchor, the estimations were smaller. The same time anchors but with different units (e.g., 1s vs 1000 ms) did not affect participants’ duration estimations. When the anchors’ units were seconds, the estimations were not different from those when the anchors’ units were milliseconds.
Two major conclusions are derived from this study. First, there is an anchoring effect in the duration estimations: long time anchors lead to larger duration estimates, and short time anchors lead to smaller duration estimates. Second, time anchors’ representation patterns do not influence the duration estimations. The duration estimations under the same time anchors but with different unit conditions do not differ. People’s representations of duration information may be semantic, rather than mere superficial representations as values plus units

Key words: duration estimateanchoring effect, SARA process model, semantic representation