The only thing I can come up with off the top of my head is the correlation between the displayed progress of a loading bar and the perceived speed. http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001058.html

That article also links to a great article called "Maximizing Human Performance" (http://www.asktog.com/basics/03Performance.html) which goes over a few topics, including response times and their perceived meaning and optimizing user flows for the human thinking process.