Age-related changes in time perception: The impact of naturalistic environments and retrospective judgements on timing performance.

Martin Riemer,Thomas Wolbers,Hedderik Van Rijn

doi:10.1177/17470218211023362

Abstract

Reduced timing abilities have been reported in older adults and are associated with pathological cognitive decline. However, time perception experiments often lack ecological validity. Especially the reduced complexity of experimental stimuli and the participants’ awareness of the time-related nature of the task can influence lab-assessed timing performance and thereby conceal age-related differences. An approximation of more naturalistic paradigms can provide important information about age-related changes in timing abilities. To determine the impact of higher ecological validity on timing experiments, we implemented a paradigm that allowed us to test (1) the effect of embedding the to-be-timed stimuli within a naturalistic visual scene and (2) the effect of retrospective time judgements, which are more common in real life than prospective judgements. The results show that compared with out-of-context stimuli, younger adults benefit from a naturalistic embedding of stimuli (reflected in higher precision and less errors), whereas the performance of older adults is reduced when confronted with naturalistic stimuli. Differences between retrospective and prospective time judgements were not modulated by age. We conclude that, potentially driven by difficulties in suppressing temporally irrelevant environmental information, the contextual embedding of naturalistic stimuli can affect the degree to which age influences the performance in time perception tasks.

Highlights

Time perception is a fundamental aspect of everyday life and undergoes various changes across the lifespan (Löckenhoff & Rutt, 2015)
We found an interaction between dimension and task version, indicating that the advantage of spatial over temporal processing was more pronounced in the scene version (β = 1.05, SE = 0.12, BF10 >103); an interaction between attentional perspective and dimension, indicating that the benefit of prospective judgements was more pronounced for the time versus the space task (β =-0.65, SE = 0.12, BF10 >103); and a three-way interaction between age group, dimension, and task version, indicating that, with respect to space judgements, both age groups benefitted from an embedding of stimuli within a naturalistic scene, while, with respect to time judgements, older adults did not benefit from the scene version as younger adults did (β =−0.62, SE = 0.24, BF10 = 6.6)
We investigated timing abilities in older and younger adults and how their timing behaviour is (1) modulated by a naturalistic embedding of duration stimuli and (2) whether retrospective compared with prospective judgements provided differential outcomes

Summary

Introduction

Time perception is a fundamental aspect of everyday life and undergoes various changes across the lifespan (Löckenhoff & Rutt, 2015). Several studies reported reduced timing abilities in older adults (Block et al, 1998; Mioni et al, 2020; Turgeon et al, 2016), and age-related changes in the perception of time are currently discussed as a potential cognitive marker for Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia (El Haj & Kapogiannis, 2016; Maaß et al, 2019; Rueda & SchmitterEdgecombe, 2009). In lab experiments, participants are often asked to judge the duration of stimuli presented outside of any context (e.g., Riemer et al, 2019), whereas timed events in real life are always occurring within a specific context. The well-known red phase of a traffic light—often referred to as exemplifying the ubiquity of timing behaviour in real life—is always experienced within a rich visual scenery, and it is unclear how this potentially distracting information affects the timing process.

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