Psychology

With the absence of time telling devices like clocks and watches, the subject group that will be used in this experiment will tell when it is one minute, five minutes and ten minutes have elapsed. This experiment will try to find out if the male or females will be more accurate in approximating the right time and it will aim to show which times would be the most accurate.

Participants
The participants of this experiment would be five men and five females of the age bracket of twenty years to twenty-four years, all undergraduate students. The participants will be from any academic discipline such as art, history, physics and others. Additionally, the participants will be required to fill come questionnaires that inquire information such as if the participant depends on a time telling device to tell the time and what method the participant uses to tell time. They will also be asked if he or she largely depends on time telling devices to know the time, how frequently does he or she check the time, is he or she time conscious. The participants will be selected after they have willingly considered this experiment and have showed enthusiasm to take part in it.

Method
The experiment will be in a room that does not have any time telling device such as clocks and the participants will be requested to remove and hand in their watches as well as their mobile phones so that they will not be having any time telling devices in their possession. The participants will then be placed in groups five, where there will be one male and one female in each group. The purpose of this arrangement is to find out if the male or female in each group will be accurate in telling the correct time. After this, the questionnaires will be evaluated.

Procedure
Each group will be required to tell the time after a period has passed. For example, they will be required to state if a minute, five minutes or ten minutes have passed. The room where the experiment will be held will have windows in case the participants would like to look at the weather to indicate the certain time. The participants will not be allowed to discuss with each other about the time they think is right or the time they have estimated.

Results
The collected information after the estimation would be analyzed through linear regression. The participants who had confessed to having drunk an alcoholic drink before estimated the time wrongly. For instance, a male participant estimated the time passed to have been thirty minutes. However, the sober participants managed to roughly estimate the time. The female participants showed correctness in time in their time estimations than their male counterparts.

Additionally, the results of the questionnaires confirmed that the majority of the participants relied heavily on time telling devices for them to know the time in their usual lives. It was found out that, most of them were time conscious and that they were seldom late for any appointments because of this. The participants who were not time conscious stated that they really did not care much for time telling devices and some of them did not even own watches.

Discussion
According to Weiner et al (2003) past experiments have relied on the theory that the cerebral cortex in the human brain, is accountable for keeping track of time. In these past experiments, the complexity level of activities is altered to require greater use of this part of the brain. Supposedly, as the complexity increases, less brain power can be used to keep the necessary track of time, and therefore, the time estimates should be small (Weiner et al, 2003). Past research has shown that people with damaged cerebral cortex in the brain had a hard time in telling the time and keeping track of time. Additionally, some individuals are able to tell the time as well as keep track of time and this may be due to the reason that they correspond to the use of the cerebral cortex (Grondin, 2008).

In this experiment, it was concluded that the people who had taken an alcoholic drink the previous night estimated the wrong time. They stated that five minutes to them had felt like an hour and had therefore estimated the wrong time. However, the other participants who had not taken any alcoholic drink were able to roughly estimate the time. The time that they were roughly estimating was five minutes and thirty minutes. Two groups of participants were the only ones who lagged behind in roughly estimating the time because they did not correctly estimate the time.

This experiment also found that all of the participants hugely relied on time telling devices in their daily lives to know the time. One of the participants said that he could not imagine living a day without his wristwatch or mobile phone for time telling. This shows how some people hugely rely on time telling devices in their lives.