Individual differences in the perception of temporal order: The effect of age and cognition

Abstract

Temporal-order judgements in the time range of some milliseconds were assessed by using two auditory tasks in 86 participants, aged from 20 to 69 years. Two stimulus presentation modes, binaural versus monaural, were compared. Elderly participants performed worse than the younger participants; however, different patterns of age-related declines were observed, depending on the presentation mode. In the monaural mode considerable deterioration was observed beyond 60 years of age, whereas in the binaural mode declines were found much earlier, from 40 years of age. Performance of the monaural task correlated with cognitive competences and provided important insight into neuronal timing mechanisms. In contrast, the binaural mode reflected a bias towards an integrated perception of sequential stimuli and was less related to cognitive resources. These findings provide evidence that age-related declines in human sequencing abilities involve, besides temporal mechanisms, also a mode-specific processing, presumably associated with different neuronal mechanisms.

Keywords:

• Time perception
• Temporal order
• Ageing
• Intellectual resources
• Attentional resources

The study was supported by Grants PBZ-MIN/001/PO5/06, 1082/P01/2006/31, and the Fellowship “START” for Aneta Szymaszek from the Foundation for Polish Science. We would like to thank Marc Wittmann, Martina Fink, Jan Churan, and Pamela Ulbrich from the Generation Research Program of the Human Science Centre in Bad Tölz for the computer programs to assess temporal-order thresholds.