Abstract
The Temporal-Order Judgment (TOJ) paradigm has been widely investigated in previous studies as an accurate measure of temporal resolution and sequencing abilities in the millisecond time range. Two auditory TOJ tasks are often used: (1) a spatial TOJ task, in which two identical stimuli are presented in rapid succession monaurally and the task is to indicate which ear received the first stimulus and which ear received the second one (left-right or right-left), and (2) a spectral TOJ task, in which two tones of different frequencies are presented asynchronously to both ears binaurally and the task is to report the sequence of these tones (low-high or high-low). The previous literature studies conducted on young volunteers indicated that the measured temporal acuity on these two tasks depended on the procedure used. As considerable data are now available about age-related decline in temporal resolution ability, the aim of the present study was to compare in elderly subjects the pattern of performance on these two tasks. A total of 40 normal healthy volunteers aged from 62 to 78 years performed two TOJ tasks. The measurement was repeated in two consecutive sessions. Temporal resolution was indexed by the Auditory Temporal-Order Threshold (ATOT), i.e., the minimum time gap between successive stimuli necessary for a participant to report a before-after relation with 75% correctness. The main finding of the present study was the indication of differences in the elderly in performance on two tasks. In the spatial task, the distribution of obtained ATOT values did not deviate from the Gaussian distribution. In contrast, the distribution of data in the spectral task deviated significantly from the Gaussian and was spread more to the right. Although lower ATOT values were usually observed in Session 2 than in Session 1, such difference was significant only in the spectral task. We conclude that although temporal acuity and sequencing abilities in the millisecond time range are probably based in neuronal oscillatory activity, the measured ATOTs in the elderly seem to be stimulus-dependent, procedure-related, and influenced by the perceptual strategies used by participants.
Highlights
For over three decades, an increasing number of experimental studies have suggested that Temporal Information Processing (TIP) is an essential component of human cognition
As the temporal information was processed from the onset of the first stimulus within a pair and different stimulus durations were used in the spatial (1 ms) and spectral (10 ms) tasks, the Inter-Stimulus Interval (ISI) values were replaced by Stimulus-Onset Asynchrony (SOA) values to compare the performance between these two tasks
SOA reflects the time between the onset of the first stimulus and the onset of the second stimulus within a pair and gives the Auditory Temporal-Order Threshold (ATOT) values analyzed for each task and session
Summary
An increasing number of experimental studies have suggested that Temporal Information Processing (TIP) is an essential component of human cognition. This study focuses on the millisecond time domain, which provides a structure for motor and sensory processing, including speech processing (Pöppel, 1997, 2009; Wittmann, 1999, 2009, 2011; Szelag et al, 2004a, 2008, 2010, 2011, 2014; Szelag and Dacewicz, 2016). This time domain is related to the perception of succession and the temporal order of events – distinct stimuli must be separated by some tens of milliseconds in order for them to be identified as different events
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