Abstract
The perception of temporal intervals changes during the life-span, and especially older adults demonstrate specific impairments of timing abilities. Recently, we demonstrated that timing performance and cognitive status are correlated in older adults, suggesting that timing tasks can serve as a behavioral marker for the development of dementia. Easy-to-administer and retest-capable timing tasks therefore have potential as diagnostic tools for tracking cognitive decline. However, before being tested in a clinical cohort study, a further validation and specification of the original findings is warranted. Here we introduce several modifications of the original task and investigated the effects of temporal context on time perception in older adults (> 65 years) with low versus high scores in the Montreal Cognitive Assessment survey (MoCA) and a test of memory functioning. In line with our previous work, we found that temporal context effects were more pronounced with increasing memory deficits, but also that these effects are stronger for realistic compared to abstract visual stimuli. Furthermore, we show that two distinct temporal contexts influence timing behavior in separate experimental blocks, as well as in a mixed block in which both contexts are presented together. These results replicate and extend our previous findings. They demonstrate the stability of the effect for different stimulus material and show that timing tasks can reveal valuable information about the cognitive status of older adults. In the future, these findings could serve as a basis for the development of a diagnostic tool for pathological cognitive decline at an early, pre-clinical stage.
Highlights
IntroductionThe perception of time is of fundamental importance for a variety of cognitive and behavioral functions (e.g., motor planning, the timing of pauses in speech, or optimal preparation to a temporally predictable event), and it is not surprising that timing deficits play an important role in many neurodevelopmental and -degenerative disorders
The perception of time is of fundamental importance for a variety of cognitive and behavioral functions, and it is not surprising that timing deficits play an important role in many neurodevelopmental and -degenerative disorders
After the presentation of several different standard intervals, a central tendency of responses was observed: The longer durations were under-reproduced, whereas the shorter durations were over-reproduced. We demonstrated that this context effect is significantly larger in patients suffering from amnestic mild cognitive impairment, and the effect even scales with the scores on general memory tests in healthy older
Summary
The perception of time is of fundamental importance for a variety of cognitive and behavioral functions (e.g., motor planning, the timing of pauses in speech, or optimal preparation to a temporally predictable event), and it is not surprising that timing deficits play an important role in many neurodevelopmental and -degenerative disorders. As timing deficits might be related to impaired cognitive functioning in advanced age, we recently investigated the effect of temporal contexts on the performance in time reproduction tasks (Maaß et al, 2019). After the presentation of several different standard intervals, a central tendency of responses was observed: The longer durations were under-reproduced, whereas the shorter durations were over-reproduced. We demonstrated that this context effect is significantly larger in patients suffering from amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI), and the effect even scales with the scores on general memory tests in healthy older. This suggests that temporal context effects can be used as a behavioral marker for memory deficits and cognitive decline in a very early stage. When memory functions deteriorate, humans seem to be more strongly influenced by contextual information as their time judgments are more biased by expectations and most recent experiences than healthy controls (Maaß et al, 2019)
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