The Impact of Short-Form Video on Time Perception: A Contrast with Long-Form Content

The rapid proliferation of short-form video platforms has raised concerns about their cognitive effects, particularly on subjective time perception. Grounded in the Attentional Gate Model and the Contextual Change Model, this study examined how video media format (short-form vs. long-form) and content type (entertainment vs. educational) jointly influence time perception under prospective and retrospective paradigms. Seventy adolescents participated in a 2 (media format) × 2 (content type) within-subjects experiment, with all video stimuli rigorously matched on core content and perceptual characteristics. Repeated-measures ANOVAs revealed a robust main effect of media format: short-form videos consistently induced greater time underestimation than long-form videos in both prospective judgments and retrospective recall of longer intervals. Content type also exerted a significant effect in prospective timing, with entertainment videos producing stronger time compression than educational videos. Moreover, a significant interaction indicated that the time-distorting effect of short-form videos was most pronounced for entertainment content. Notably, the format effect was strongest in retrospective judgments of long intervals, suggesting a substantial memory-based distortion. These findings indicate that short-form video formats systematically compress subjective time through dual mechanisms involving attentional resource depletion during ongoing processing and impoverished episodic encoding for retrospective reconstruction, extending classical models of time perception to contemporary digital media environments.