Ageing and temporal processing of durations within the psychological present

Abstract

The predominant use of temporal information in everyday life concerns behaviour within the psychological present, which is said to have an upper limit of approximately 3–5 s. The present study was designed to investigate age differences in processing of temporal information within the psychological present by applying three distinct psychophysical tasks with base durations of 1 s. Forty young (mean age: 21.6 years) and forty older adults (mean age: 70.4 years) were presented with a temporal discrimination task, a temporal reproduction task, and a repeated production task. Pronounced impairment in older adults, as compared to young adults, was found for temporal discriminations. When asked to reproduce a 1-s target interval, young adults under-reproduced and older adults over-reproduced the target duration, but did not differ in overall accuracy and intra-individual variability. Repeated productions of a 1-s interval were unaffected by age. These findings are consistent with the notion that older adults show impaired performance when stimulus timing is required, whereas response timing is unaffected by ageing.