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Someone in the know, or field, does this have anything to do with the phenomenon of looking at the second hand on clocks and feeling like the initial second is always longer??

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That's caused by the way the brain 'edits out' motion that occurs during saccade eye movements. If the second hand ticks at the same time as your eyes are panning toward it, you won't see the tick happening. Once the saccade finishes, it feels like the second hand was in its final position that entire time, even though it only just arrived there.

It's similar to the blind spot in your visual field. Your brain fills in the blind spot with what it expects to be there.

With the clock's second hand it's filling in temporally rather than spatially. Your brain goes back in time to fill in where it expects the hand to be

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