Uncovering the influence of time perception on decision-making about time

Perception and decision-making are two cognitive processes that are strongly interrelated but that are rarely studied in a unified framework. When decisions concern time-related attributes, a proper understanding of the influence of time perception is critical to disentangle the role of these two cognitive processes on individuals’ choices. This paper reports a lab experiment with university students from London, United Kingdom, and Santiago, Chile to study the impact of time perception on their route choices in a transportation system. A major novelty in the experimental design is the inclusion of an experimental condition where participants must rely on their perception of the time attributes of animated bus trips to choose their preferred bus route. Subsequently, a numerical condition presents the attributes of the same bus routes with numbers, which serves as a baseline for interpreting the impact of time perception on route choice decisions. By leveraging psychophysical principles of time perception and a discrete choice modeling framework, we formulate behavioral models that integrate choice data gathered from the animated and numerical conditions. These models incorporate psychophysical functions to capture the ability of participants to perceive the time attributes of the available bus routes. Our results show that (i) the effect of time perception on route choice decisions is robust across countries ii) the participants’ preferences for waiting and in-vehicle time can be properly recovered if the effect of time perception is controlled for. This evidence should help to produce a unified account of the interrelationship between time perception and decision-making about time.