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Abstract
It has been proposed that the perception of very short duration is governed by sensory mechanisms, whereas the perception of longer duration depends on cognitive capacities. Four duration discrimination tasks (modalities: visual, auditory; base duration: 100 ms, 1000 ms) were used to study the relation between time perception, age, sex, and cognitive abilities (alertness, visual and verbal working memory, general fluid reasoning) in 100 subjects aged between 21 and 84 years. Temporal acuity was higher (Weber fractions are lower) for longer stimuli and for the auditory modality. Age was related to the visual 100 ms condition only, with lower temporal acuity in elder participants. Alertness was significantly related to auditory and visual Weber fractions for shorter stimuli only. Additionally, visual working memory was a significant predictor for shorter visual stimuli. These results indicate that alertness, but also working memory, are associated with temporal discrimination of very brief duration.
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Acknowledgments
This study was supported by the grants 01 GZ 0301 and 01 IBC 01H from the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF). We thank Nicole Krüger, Kristina Starke, and Florian Wiech for their help in collecting the data. Thanks also to Hans Strasburger for his help and advice in the implementation of the psychophysical algorithm. We are grateful to Jiří Wackermann for comments on the final version of the manuscript. We also thank Åke Hellström and an anonymous reviewer for their suggestions which helped to improve this paper.