fairfolio
Saved Projects

The Effect of the Perceived Fun of Various Activities on Time Perception

CSEF · 2004 Behavioral Sciences

Alex P. Mandel · Alternative Family Education Home Study Prog, Santa Cruz

Overview

Objectives/Goals The purpose of this study was to determine if the perception of time changes depending on what a person is doing and whether or not they perceive the activity as fun. My hypothesis was that time will seem to pass more quickly for people engaged in activities they perceive as fun. Methods/Materials I gave 83 fourth and fifth graders four different activities: alphabetizing, catching Styrofoam puffs in cups, translating words into code, and long division. I timed each activity for 1 minute 22 seconds and asked the students to write down how much time they thought had gone by each time. I then asked them to rate the activities "lots of fun," "sort of fun," "neutral," "not very fun," or "not at all fun." Results For the activities rated very fun, 43% of the time estimates were less than the real time and 57% of the guesses were more. For the activities rated not fun at all, 41% of the time estimates were less than the real time and 59% were more. For all of the activities ranging from very fun to not fun at all, the majority of people thought more time had gone by than actually had (time dragged). Conclusions/Discussion My hypothesis that time seems to pass more quickly when you're having fun was not correct. For all of the activities ranging from very fun to not fun at all, the majority of people thought more time had gone by than actually had (time dragged). Many of the time estimates were so far off that I thought that perhaps fourth and fifth graders are not very good at determining time intervals and might not be the best subjects for this type of experiment. In future studies I would use an older population.

Summary statement

This project was designed to determine if a person's perception of time changes depending on what the person is doing and whether or not they perceive the activity as fun.

Help received

My mother helped me format my questionnaires and helped me enter my data into Excel. She also proofread my writing and drove me to school to do the experiments. Three teachers let me use the students in their classes as subjects. My brother helped me produce a graph from Excel.

Competition history

  • CSEF 2004 Behavioral Sciences · Entry J0322

Resources

Related projects

Closest projects by meaning, across every fair and year in the corpus.

Browse more like this

Source: California Science & Engineering Fair public projects

Save projects to your library

Sign in with Google to keep track of projects you find interesting, organized into folders. An account also raises your daily allowance for “Has this been done?”, and lets you create a key for the MCP server with a much higher limit than anonymous use. Browsing stays public.

Continue with Google