How Many Minutes, and How Fast? Nature Photographs and Delayed Choices

At the end of a session, someone might ask you two questions: how many minutes have passed, and how quickly did time seem to pass? One invites a number; the other invites an impression. Closely related as they sound, the answers need not carry the same information. A 2015 study by Meredith S. Berry and colleagues makes that distinction visible while examining nature photographs, time judgments, and choices about delayed rewards. Its interest lies partly in the fact that its different measures of time did not all produce the same pattern. [1]

The research title suggests a broad story about natural environments lengthening subjective time and reducing impulsivity. The experiment measured something more specific: university students viewing photographs on a screen, making hypothetical monetary choices, and answering several kinds of timing question. It cannot establish that every period spent in nature makes a person durably more patient. The first task is to identify which question was answered by which result. [1]

Images on a screen, not a walk outdoors

Forty-five students participated. Two were excluded from the analyses because their discounting responses did not meet the study's systematicity criterion, leaving forty-three: twenty-two in the nature condition and twenty-one in the built-environment condition. Participants were assigned by block randomization. They worked individually in a quiet room without visible clocks, watches, or mobile phones. [1]

One group saw photographs of natural settings such as mountains, forests, and lakes. The other saw built settings such as buildings, cities, and roads. Before the monetary-choice task, twenty-five photographs were presented for ten seconds each, with additional photographs shown between delay blocks. This was not an outdoor-walking intervention. The paper discussed earlier research involving real environments, but the manipulation in this experiment concerned the images displayed on a computer. [1]

That boundary does not make the images unimportant. A screen can supply part of the context in which decisions occur. Nevertheless, movement, weather, sound, smell, and social interaction outdoors were not separately tested here. Equating a photograph condition with the entirety of an everyday experience would obscure what the researchers actually changed.

An amount now versus an amount later

Participants chose between a smaller immediate amount and one hundred dollars after a delay. These were hypothetical outcomes, not actual hundred-dollar payments. At the beginning of each delay block, the immediate alternative was fifty dollars. Its amount then adjusted according to the participant's responses. This titration aimed to estimate the subjective value of the delayed reward rather than categorize someone as patient or impatient from one fixed question. [1]

The tested delays ranged from one day to twenty-five years. Discounting measures described how strongly the delayed money lost subjective value as delay increased. Higher values of the fitted k parameter indicated steeper discounting; a higher area under the curve indicated less discounting. Both measures came from the same choices. Their agreement was not evidence from two independent experiments. [1]

The group viewing nature photographs discounted the future money less steeply. That was consistent with less impulsive choice within this task. It did not demonstrate improved self-control in every part of life. Actual financial needs, confidence in real payments, and decisions involving other outcomes were not the experiment's subject. A task-based measure and a lasting personality trait are different scopes of claim. [1]

The first time question: estimating minutes

The researchers also compared actual session durations. Their group means did not differ significantly. Even so, participants in the nature condition estimated that more minutes had elapsed since the beginning. The difference concerned the numerical estimates, not the amount of time recorded by a clock. Giving an estimate as a number does not turn it into an objective measurement; it makes the answer directly comparable with elapsed time. [1]

A crucial detail was that these minute estimates did not correlate significantly with either discounting measure. The nature condition was associated with both longer estimates and less steep discounting, but people reporting more minutes were not thereby shown to prefer delayed money more strongly. Placing two group differences alongside each other does not demonstrate that one produced the other. This measure did not establish the proposed connecting link. [1]

The second question: the felt passage of time

Another question asked participants to rate whether time seemed to fly or drag. That judgment was different from estimating a number of minutes. Although the nature group's average response leaned toward a slower felt passage, the difference between conditions was not statistically significant. It would therefore be inaccurate to report an unqualified condition effect on this rating. [1]

The passage rating did correlate significantly with area under the discounting curve. Its association with k, however, did not reach significance. Selecting only the positive association would conceal the distinction between the reported measures. One time measure distinguished the image conditions without relating significantly to monetary discounting; another related to one discounting measure without clearly distinguishing the conditions. The results were more selective than a single slowing-of-time account would suggest. [1]

The third question: discriminating short intervals

Participants also completed a temporal-bisection task. They judged whether short picture presentations were closer to reference durations of 0.4 or 1.6 seconds. This task did not reveal a difference between nature and built conditions, or an association with discounting. Estimating the duration of a whole session and discriminating a brief image presentation did not yield interchangeable results. [1]

That pattern does not support a simple claim that one internal clock slowed by the same amount everywhere. Numerical duration, felt passage, and short-interval discrimination showed different outcomes within the same study. They all concern time, but the question, timescale, and information available for the answer differ. A shared label cannot justify substituting one measure for another.

The mechanism remained open

The authors discussed attention and arousal as possible contributors, but these processes were not measured in the experiment. Long-duration judgments were also obtained after the choice tasks. Decisions made during the session, or other aspects of the session itself, might therefore influence retrospective estimates. The study did not establish a one-way causal chain from nature images through slower subjective time to greater patience. [1]

Random assignment strengthens the comparison between the two image conditions. It does not make every associated measure a demonstrated mediator. Nor does it establish which visual or emotional feature of the photographs explains a difference. With no neutral third condition, the experiment also cannot separately identify improvement from a baseline versus an adverse effect of the built images. Those are additional questions, not automatic consequences of the group comparison.

The small student sample and hypothetical rewards further limit generalization. No lasting health benefit, treatment effect, or universal outdoor-exposure recommendation follows from these data. The study's useful contribution is more precise: it opens an appealing headline into several concrete questions that can disagree. How many minutes passed, how time felt while passing, and how long a brief interval lasted were not three equivalent ways of asking the same thing.

Sources

[1] Berry, M. S., Repke, M. A., Nickerson, N. P., Conway, L. G. III, Odum, A. L., and Jordan, K. E. (2015). Making Time for Nature: Visual Exposure to Natural Environments Lengthens Subjective Time Perception and Reduces Impulsivity. PLOS ONE, 10(11), e0141030. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0141030 . DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0141030. Original research under a Creative Commons Attribution license; this article is an independently written explanation and assessment.