The Machine's Internal Clock: Do LLMs Share Human Temporal Illusions?
Human perception of time is subjective. Well-documented temporal illusions show that the brain relies on context and relational cues for judging duration instead of tracking elapsed time directly. Prior studies established these effects with visual and auditory stimuli. Existing LLM evaluations of temporal perception focus on estimating event durations or multi-step temporal reasoning. In this work, we investigate whether written narratives alone can evoke human temporal illusions, using a new benchmark of 6,684 narrative pairs spanning five illusions. We find that human readers (60 participants) prefer expected scenarios in only two of the five illusions, those where the manipulation is ...
| Authors | Catherine Bao, Vivek Srikumar |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 15 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 15 August 2026 |
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