Lost in the story: the connection between immersion and time duration estimation

Immersion or transportation is a process in which the recipient becomes deeply engaged with a story. Immersion is commonly characterized by reduced awareness of the actual surroundings, including the passage of time. Even while staying physically in the same place, the recipient may face a distinct story-world with its idiosyncratic effects. Some authors have described immersion as thickening of situation models. Story comprehension is based on mental representations that are constructed dynamically as the story progresses. Comprehension relies on updating of situation models, that help the recipient store and process information of the story concepts in an efficient form. This study examined how well the participants can keep track of time while listening to an audiobook. More specifically, the study examined the relation between immersion and time duration estimation while listening to longer literary material. In addition, it was studied whether participants’ focusing on the story is connected to the time duration estimations. In this experiment, eighteen participants listened to an audiobook and completed story-related assessments. Before the actual experiment, participants’ accuracy of time duration estimation was measured on a separate time production task so that individual differences on time duration estimation could be controlled. During the experiment, participant listened to 36 excerpts of varying length. After each snippet, participants were prompted with a time duration estimation task and were asked about their degree of immersion. The time duration estimation considered the story: the participants were to estimate the duration of an interval from a certain target event happening in the story. The data was analysed using linear mixed models. Absolute value of the difference between the story-related time duration estimations and objective time durations was set as the response variable. Based on the results, participants’ immersion did not statistically significantly predict absolute time estimation errors, and neither did the separately measured time duration estimation accuracy. On a separate model, participants focus did not show an effect either. In general, participants’ ability to estimate time durations while listening to an audiobook showed a two-fold pattern: on one hand, the estimations were often relatively close to the objectively measured values; on the other hand, some estimations were very inflated. One possible explanation for the results is that the task was simply too hard for the participants. Time duration estimations have been traditionally done with shorter stimuli. Using longer stimuli may have left the participants guessing. It has been argued, that longer estimation intervals bring more variance in the estimations. Furthermore, the target events might not have been adequately chosen. Since concept’s centrality and distinctiveness as well as its connectivity affects its memorability, it is not trivial, which concepts are chosen as target events. Also, since the audio files covered a united story instead of separate story excerpts, immersion had a tendency to continue from one part to the next. Future research should focus on broadening the research on time duration estimations using longer stimuli. The narrative elements should be taken into consideration and be controlled more carefully. In addition, certain elements, such as affective and bodily contents of the story should be acknowledged. Moreover, the exact reasoning for participants’ time duration estimation could be fruitful to identify. Also, immersion studies should be done using distinct stories as stimuli as well.