Dividing Time: Concurrent Timing of Auditory and Visual Events by Young and Elderly Adults

Abstract

This article examines age differences in individual's ability to produce the durations of learned auditory and visual target events either in isolation (focused attention) or concurrently (divided attention). Young adults produced learned target durations equally well in focused and divided attention conditions. Older adults, in contrast, showed an age-related increase in timing variability in divided attention conditions that tended to be more pronounced for visual targets than for auditory targets. Age-related impairments were associated with a decrease in working memory span; moreover, the relationship between working memory and timing performance was largest for visual targets in divided attention conditions.

This research was supported by PHS grant AG20560. Portions of these data were previously presented at the 2003 meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. The authors are grateful to Scott Brown and James Cutting for their comments on an earlier version of the manuscript. The authors thank Steve Borawski and Nathaniel Miller for their assistance in data collection and the other members of the Rhythm, Attention, and Perception Lab at Bowling Green State University for their assistance in the completion of this project.

Notes

Note. A = auditory target duration; V = visual target duration.

¹To examine effects of modality, separate 3 (age group) × 2 (attention condition) × 2 (modality) ANOVAs were conducted for short and long target durations rather than the omnibus four-way ANOVA with duration as the fourth factor due to the fact that the two (reversed) pairings of modality and target duration prevents a simple interpretation of the four-way analysis. To understand why this produces a problem of interpretation, it is important to first note that the counterbalancing means that for approximately half of the participants in each age group, the 6-s (short) target was marked by a tone and the 12-s (long) target was marked by a white square (short-auditory/long-visual pairing), whereas for the remaining participants, the short target was marked by the white square and the long target was marked by a tone (short-visual/long-auditory pairing). Thus, as a result of this aspect of the design, any effects of modality (or interactions with modality) in the four-way ANOVA would need to be qualified by the duration-modality pairing.

*Correlation is significant at the .05 level (two-tailed).

**Correlation is significant at the .01 level (two-tailed).