Temporal Judgments: The Effects of Sensory Interference and Limited Attention

Based on theories of sensory interference and limited attention and on the previous finding of Brown and Stubbs (1992), it was hypothesized that (a) timing judgments are more accurate when prospective rather than retrospective, (b) timing judgments and text comprehension are worse when both tasks must be done using the same sensory mode rather than different modes, and (c) text comprehension is worse when another task competes for attention. The results definitely confirm (c) and give mild support to (a). The validity of (b) is ambiguous, but a limited domain for sensory interference is proposed along with other explanations.