Ornstein [83] proposed one of the earliest cognitive theories
of remembered duration, and likened it to a constructive process
at the time of retrieval wherein the number of events
that were encoded during the experience is related to the
length of the remembered duration. In other words, an experience
remembered as being filled with more events will also be
remembered as being longer in hindsight (cf. [22]). However,
many studies since that time have shown that the successful
encoding of events that occurs during an experience is not a
primary determinant of remembered duration [84–89].
Instead, remembered duration is related to encoding into
memory changes in the context1 surrounding the occurrence
of events throughout an experience [16]. Some insight into
how duration of an experience is estimated retrospectively
is gleaned by considering the simple situation in which subjects
learn a distinct sequence of events. Here, the experience
is defined by the beginning and end of a discrete event. The
question of interest is whether the ‘empty’ duration between
the two events is incidentally encoded into memory—that is,
even when subjects have no explicit instruction that they will
need to express this information.