Abstract
Making a round trip, the return trip often seems shorter, which is called “return trip effect”. We investigated this effect psychologically and physiologically. Ten participants, a round-trip group, watched round-trip walking movies. Different ten participants, a control group, watched two walking movies of different ways. Participants evaluated time by two methods: RP3 and 11-point scale. Heart rate (HR) and cardiac vagal index (CVI) were calculated. On mean RP3, HR and CVI there was no difference between groups, but on 11-point scale only the round-trip group evaluated the first movie was longer, and a significant correlation was found between the difference of CVI and 11-point scale for only the control group. These suggest that the return trip might be caused postdictively as 11-point scale was evaluated afterward, and that time perception might be related to parasympathetic nervous system, but cognitive load might have stronger influence.
