Memory shapes time perception and intertemporal choices

Our aim is to propose a model of subjective time based on information theory and to investigate its implications relative to two phenomena: 1 Time perception. Why does time appear to slow down when you visit a new place, and speed up once you get familiar with it? Recent findings in psychology, neuroscience, and ethology suggest that perceived duration does not coincide with physical duration, but rather depend on the statistical properties of stimuli. Experiments in psychophysics experiments have shown that, if presented with a train of repeated stimuli at constant time intervals (e.g., a letter, word, object, or face), subjects would perceive them as decreasing in duration [70, 44]. On the other hand, the opposite effect is reported whenever the properties of a train of stimuli are suddenly changed: brighter [10, 66], bigger [41, 73], dynamic [11, 31], or more complex stimuli [54, 49] appear to last longer. Measurements of brain activity have found that longer durations correlate with increased neuronal firing rates, fMRI, or EEG signals [2, 20, 16, 35, 45, 40]. When combined with ideas from information theory, these observations have led to the hypothesis that the subjective duration of a stimulus is proportional to the amount of neural energy required to represent said stimulus, and that this energy is a signature of the coding efficiency [21].