Dynamic attending and responses to time.

A temporally based theory of attending is proposed that assumes that the structure of world events affords different attending modes. Future-oriented attending supports anticipatory behaviors and occurs with highly coherent temporal events. Time judgments, given this attending mode, axe influenced by the way an event's ending confirms or violates temporal expectancies. Analytic attending supports other activities (e.g., grouping, counting), and if it occurs with events of low temporal coherence, then time judgments depend on the attending levels involved. A weighted contrast model describes overand underestimations of event durations. The model applies to comparative duration judgments of equal and unequal time intervals; its rationale extends to temporal productions/extrapolations. Two experiments compare predictions of the contrast model with those derived from other traditional approaches.