Cognitive abilities required in time judgment depending on the temporal tasks used: A comparison of children and adults

Abstract

The aim of this study was to examine age-related differences in time judgments during childhood as a function of the temporal task used. Children aged 5 and 8 years, as well as adults, were submitted to 3 temporal tasks (bisection, generalization and reproduction) with short (0.4/0.8 s) and long durations (8/16 s). Furthermore, their cognitive capacities in terms of working memory, attentional control, and processing speed were assessed by a wide battery of neuropsychological tests. The results showed that the age-related differences in time judgment were greater in the reproduction task than in the temporal discrimination tasks. This task was indeed more demanding in terms of working memory and information processing speed. In addition, the bisection task appeared to be easier for children than the generalization task, whereas these 2 tasks were similar for the adults, although the generalization task required more attention to be paid to the processing of durations. Our study thus demonstrates that it is important to understand the different cognitive processes involved in time judgment as a function of the temporal tasks used before venturing to draw conclusions about the development of time perception capabilities.

Teachers, not parents, are able to predict time processing skills in preschoolers

“…Globally, the profile of sense of time skills as reported by teachers showed a stronger predictive power towards the time discrimination task, and around half of variance of this task was explained by questionnaires’ scores. Time discrimination is considered a less demanding task, in terms of general cognitive skills such as working memory and speed processing, and seems to be a more ‘pure’ measure of time processing, compared to time reproduction (Droit‐Volet, Wearden, & Zélanti, ). Therefore, it is possible that the Sense of Time Questionnaire score, as rated by teachers, can more accurately predict time discrimination skills than time reproduction, that is the result of cognitive processes that go further beyond the sense of time as assessed by this questionnaire; in line with this observation, the variance explained by the questionnaire scores was low for the time reproduction task.…”

The Psychology of Time Perception

“…Th ey found that the diff erent executive functions made different contributions to diff erent timing tasks, but more generally, that performance on diff erent tasks may be dependent on diff erent "general" psychological components (e.g. Droit-Volet, Wearden, & Zélanti, 2015 ), and this might be part of the reason that eff ects of ageing seem to depend on the timing task used.…”

Women Overestimate Temporal Duration: Evidence from Chinese Emotional Words

“…We did not completely rule out a memory difference between the sexes for the results. In both two experiments, all participants reached 100% accuracy in their performance of training 2 phase before starting the test session and standard stimuli were presented five times each at the beginning of each block to prevent participants from forgetting them, which are consistent with numerous previous studies (e.g., Gan et al, 2009; Zhang et al, 2014b; Droit-Volet et al, 2015). However, the former just can suggest that, in some way, there are no difference between subjects’ resolving ability for the standard durations (i.e., 400 and 1600 ms), and the latter can’t discriminate different memory ability for men and women.…”

“…From one point of view, according to the models of scalar expectancy theory, temporal information processing consists of several cognitive stages, including precise internal clock, memory, and decision process (Gibbon et al, 1984; Rubia and Smith, 2004), which could mean that the categories of cognitive resources (e.g., attention, working memory, updating and inhibition) required by various temporal tasks exist inherent differences because of their specific details (Gil and Droit-Volet, 2011b; Droit-Volet et al, 2015). For instance, some studies emphasized that memory process might play a very limited role in the bisection task because participants could create new reference standards of “Short” and “Long” during the continuous comparison between probe stimuli and original standards (Allan, 2002; Droit-Volet and Rattat, 2007), while this memory capacity is very important to the temporal reproduction task in the same situation (Droit-Volet et al, 2015). Thus, multifarious performances could be observed in previous studies even if the researcher employed the same stimulus material (Gil and Droit-Volet, 2011b).…”

“…Even though the overall woman-to-man ratio in some experiments was 0.5, the gender difference of emotional time distortion was neither examined nor reported (e.g., Gil and Droit-Volet, 2011b; Droit-Volet et al, 2015). Nevertheless, gender constitutes an important factor that influences cognitive processes and emotional reactivity (Hyde, 2014).…”