Age-related changes in time production and reproduction tasks: Involvement of attention and working memory processes

ABSTRACT

Several studies have reported age-related differences in time estimation, which have been attributed either to a slowing of the pacemaker rate with aging or to impaired attention and/or working resources in older adults. Here, we compared performance of young and older participants on time production/reproduction tasks and on working memory, divided attention, sustained attention and executive attention tasks. Results showed that relative to young participants, older adults significantly under-reproduced and tended to over-produce target durations. Neither attention nor working memory predicted time reproduction and production performance. Conversely, when temporal variability was considered, participants’ temporal variability in time production tasks was exclusively accounted for by age, whereas variability in temporal reproduction was also explained by divided attention and working memory. Overall, our results extend previous investigations on timing abilities in the elderly and underscore the importance of divided attention and working memory in the maintenance of a stable representation of durations.

KEYWORDS:

• Time reproduction
• time production
• aging
• attention
• working memory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The correlation between RATIO in the simple reproduction task and age remained statistically significant after partialling out the effect of education.

2. For all but the concurrent reproduction task, the correlations between CV and age remained statistically significant after partialling out the effect of education.