We’ve all felt it before: for whatever reason, the trip coming home seemed a lot quicker than the trip going there. This isn’t just you losing your already tenuous grip on reality; on the contrary, several studies have confirmed the existence of what researchers call the “return trip effect.” Even when travel distance and time are the same there and back, the back feels measurably shorter.
Exactly why this effect occurs is a source of ongoing inquiry. Eryn Brown at the L.A. Times reports on a new study in PLOS One offering one potential explanation: it’s not that we’re bad at judging how long a trip is taking, it’s that we’re bad at remembering how long it took. That’s what the researchers found when asking study participants to watch a video of a round-trip then asking them to judge its length in real-time and retrospectively.
The study does support the basic “return trip effect,” but its methods and reasoning are unconvincing. The sample size was woefully small, at 20 participants. The researchers assumed we have to travel the exact same route there and back to feel the effect, which isn’t necessarily true. And their conclusion was flat: even if people recall return trips poorly, the question of why they have this particular memory failure still remains.
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