Journal
QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY
Volume 74, Issue 11, Pages 2002-2012Publisher
SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD
DOI: 10.1177/17470218211023362
Keywords
Time perception; retrospective; prospective; aging; ecological validity
Funding
- Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) [411006663]
- research programme Interval Timing in the Real World: A functional, computational and neuroscience approach, - Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) [453-16-005]
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Older adults show reduced timing abilities, potentially influenced by the experimental environment. Naturalistic embedding of stimuli in experiments provides insights into age-related changes in timing abilities.
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.
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