Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Previous research has shown that secondary tasks sometimesinterfere with the perception of time. In this study, we look atthe impact of background music, and the familiarity of musicon the reproduction of a time interval. We hypothesize thatboth music listening and attending to time require declarativememory access, and that conflicts between the two can explainwhy the reproduced intervals are longer when participants lis-ten to music. A cognitive model based on the PRIMs architec-ture, but built from two existing models can explain the data,including the effect of music familiarity. The model is a com-bination of two existing models: one of time perception, whichrequires occasional memory access to check whether the inter-val is already over, and one of music perception, which triesto predict the next musical phrase based on the one currentlyperceived. The memory conflict between the two models re-produces the effects found in the data.