Retrospective duration judgments of naturalistic events depend on memories of event boundaries

Daily planning and goal-directed behavior rely on accurate judgments of the duration of past experience. Although retrospective duration judgments are often shorter than the actual time elapsed, how episodic memory changes may impact duration judgments remains unclear. Here, participants watched videos depicting daily events with clear boundaries segmenting each subevent. Participants then completed recall and duration judgment tasks both immediately and after 7 days. Results showed that the recall of the event structure, specifically the number of subevents, significantly influenced immediate and delayed duration judgments. In contrast, memories of gist and number of details had no major impact. However, subevent duration judgments differ, with immediate judgments linked to gist and detail richness, while delayed judgments tend to average out. Together, these results provide new knowledge on the relationship between retrospective duration judgments and memories of naturalistic events, and how such relationship changes over time for different event structures.