Investigating the impact of healthy aging on memory for temporal duration and order

ABSTRACT

Temporal information, including information about temporal order and duration, is a fundamental component of event sequence memory. While previous research has demonstrated that aging can have a detrimental effect on memory for temporal order, there has been limited insight into the effect of aging on memory for durations, particularly within the context of sequences. In the current study, neurologically healthy young and older participants were administered two temporal match-mismatch tasks: one in which they were instructed on each trial to compare the temporal order or duration information of stimulus sequences presented first in a study phase and then, after a short delay, in a test phase (event sequence task); and a second in which participants were required to compare single durations or sequences of durations across study and test phases of each trial (pinwheel task). Consistent with the literature, the older participants were significantly poorer compared to their younger counterparts at making temporal order match-mismatch judgments in the event sequence task. In addition to this, data from both tasks suggested that the older adults were also less accurate at match-mismatch judgments based on duration information, with tentative evidence from the pinwheel task to suggest that this age-related effect was most prominent when the duration information was presented within a sequence. We suggest that age-related changes to medial temporal and frontal lobe function may contribute to changes in memory for temporal information in older adults, given the importance of these regions to event sequence memory.

KEYWORDS:

• Sequence memory
• time
• episodic memory
• working memory
• aging

Acknowledgments

The authors thank all participants for their time. The contents of this manuscript do not represent the view of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs or the U.S. Government.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada [Canada Graduate Scholarship - Doctorate to ST; Discovery Grant to DP, AL]; U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs [Senior Research Career Scientist Award from the Clinical Science Research and Development Service to MV].