Abstract: Duration perception can be affected by the oddness of stimuli. An oddball stimulus will be judged to have lasted longer than others of equal physical duration in a repeated series. It has been suggested that there are three main hypotheses to explain the subjective expansion of duration: attention hypothesis, arousal hypothesis and the neural coding efficiency hypothesis. The issues, such as variable confusion, the cross-modal effects and the time factors, are worth considering for future studies. Furthermore, no agreements are reached on the psychological and neural mechanisms of the subjective expansion of duration, and further explorations to these problems are of great significance to understand duration perception.

Key words: duration perception, oddball stimulus, attention, arousal, the neural coding efficiency