[9급 지방직 영어 2017년 18번]

Novelty-induced time expansion is a well-characterized phenomenon which can be investigated under laboratory conditions. Simply asking people to estimate the length of time they are exposed to a train of stimuli shows that novel stimuli simply seem to last longer than repetitive or unremarkable ones. In fact, just being the first stimulus in a moderately repetitive series appears to be sufficient to induce subjective time expansion. Of course, it is easy to think of reasons why our brain has evolved to work like this—presumably novel and exotic stimuli require more thought and consideration than familiar ones, so it makes sense for the brain to allocate them more subjective time.