It has been suggested that the rate of passage of time becomes slower during a car crash. Any such distortion of subjective time may have important implications for people's behaviour in dangerous driving situations and their subsequent memory of the events they experience. Research on retrospective and prospective time estimation tasks is reviewed and a new task is introduced in which films of events are systematically altered in speed. Participants then have to judge what alteration has been made to the film speed. In the first experiment drivers were reliably found to judge films of dangerous driving situations as having been sped up, while films of safer driving events were judged as playing too slowly. There was some evidence that older, more experienced drivers might overestimate the speed of dangerous events more than younger novice drivers. In a second experiment, participants viewed films of themselves or other people performing easy or harder tasks in the laboratory. Easy tasks and films of the participants themselves were most likely to be judged as having been increased in speed. The overestimation of the speed of dangerous events appeared to be a real phenomenon and was not interpretable in terms of the difficulty of the task or a lack of control. This could explain why drivers remember dangerous events as if time had slowed down, but it does not resolve the question of whether any such distortion actually happens at a time a dangerous event is experienced, or happens because of a later distortion of memory. For the covering abstract please see ITRD E157496
Abstract