Lack of Temporal Impairment in Patients With Mild Cognitive Impairment.

Francesco Perini,Lucia Meligrana,Giovanna Mioni,Franca Stablum,Michela Marcon

doi:10.3389/fnint.2019.00042

Francesco Perini, Lucia Meligrana + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fnint.2019.00042

Copy DOI

Abstract

In the present study, we investigate possible temporal impairment in patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and the amount of temporal distortions caused by the presentation of emotional facial expressions (anger, shame, and neutral) in MCI patients and controls. Twelve older adults with MCI and 14 healthy older adults were enrolled in the present study. All participants underwent a complete neuropsychological evaluation. We used three timing tasks to tap temporal abilities, namely time bisection (standard intervals lasting 400 and 1600 ms), finger-tapping (free and 1 s), and simple reaction-time tasks. The stimuli used in the time bisection task were facial emotional stimuli expressing anger or shame to investigate a possible contribution of emotional information as previously observed in healthy adults. MCI patients showed temporal abilities comparable to controls. We observed an effect of facial emotional stimuli on time perception when data were analyzed in terms of proportion of long responses, and this result was mainly driven by the temporal overestimation when a facial expression of anger was presented in controls. Results seem to suggest that the severity of the cognitive dysfunction accounts more for subjective temporal impairment than a compromised internal clock.

Highlights

Many daily life activities rely on accurate temporal estimation, and time processing represents a fundamental cognitive function
We investigate if differences in temporal judgments in mild cognitive impairment (MCI) patients relative to healthy controls are related to the level of cognitive function in MCI patients
When data were analyzed in terms of bisection point (BP), the main effect of Emotion was significant [F(2,48) = 3.40, p = 0.041, η2p = 0.12]; Group interacted with Emotion [F(2,48) = 3.64, p = 0.034, η2p = 0.13]

Summary

Introduction

Many daily life activities rely on accurate temporal estimation, and time processing represents a fundamental cognitive function. A decision process compares the current duration values with those in working and reference memory to decide on the adequate temporal response. An extension of this model comes from the attentional gate model (Zakay and Block, 1996), developed to explain the influence of a person’s attentional resource allocation on temporal judgments. Time Perception in MCI the pacemaker; when attentional resources are allocated to timing, the gate is opened wider, allowing for more pulses entering the accumulator, resulting in more accurate temporal judgments (Zakay and Block, 1996). When participants are asked to estimate time while performing other cognitive tasks, the accuracy of time estimation is reduced because time estimation shares attentional resources with the non-temporal tasks and the amount of the shared resources depends on the nature of the second task (Brown, 1997)

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion