Development of time sensitivity: Duration ratios in time bisection

Abstract

This study investigated the development of children's abilities to discriminate durations as a function of their ratio and examined whether the ability to discriminate durations that differed by a very difficult ratio is related to the development of attention capacities. Children aged 5 and 8 years, as well as adults, performed a series of temporal bisection tasks with a ratio between the short and the long anchor duration that was changed to control the difficulty of the task (5:6, 2:3, and 1:2) in two duration ranges (<1 s and >3 s). In addition, they completed neuropsychological tests in order to assess their short-term memory, working memory, and visual attention abilities. The results showed that, at ratios of 2:3 and 1:2, most participants were able to discriminate the anchor durations in bisection. However, their sensitivity to time improved, whatever the duration range, both as the distance between the anchor durations increased and with increasing age. For the smallest duration ratio (5:6), few of the children were able to discriminate the anchor durations in the bisection task in comparison to adults. Hierarchical regression analyses performed on the neuropsychological tests revealed that, for the 2:3 ratio between anchor durations, the participants' visual attention scores explained a large part of the variance in time sensitivity. The children's lower temporal sensitivity was probably due to their limited visual attention abilities, thus explaining the difficulty they experienced in discriminating very close durations (5:6).

Isochronous Sequential Presentation Helps Children Orient Their Attention in Time

“…To predict the moment at which the target is expected to appear, the moment of interval onset must be held in working memory and continuously compared to the currently elapsing time until the critical (predicted) time is reached. Children’s timing abilities are known to correlate strongly with mnemonic and attentional capacity ( Zélanti and Droit-Volet, 2011 , 2012 ; Droit-Volet, 2013 , 2016 ; Droit-Volet and Zélanti, 2013a , b ; Droit-Volet and Coull, 2016 ) and, as compared to adults, their temporal sensitivity is disproportionally perturbed when their memory of the reference duration is deliberately degraded ( Delgado and Droit-Volet, 2007 ). Therefore, the repeated, sequential presentation of the temporal cue in our study may have provided a robust temporal scaffold to counteract the additional cognitive demands of the temporal task.…”

Time and distance estimation in children using an egocentric navigation task

“…17 for a critical discussion of the nativist-empirist debate within spatial development), refinements surely take place during childhood 9 . These refinements also include cognitive factors that help solving timing or spatial tasks like understanding of verbal instructions, attentional focus on the task and motor demands 18 , processing speed 19 , and short-term memory 20 . It is therefore sometimes hard to determine whether developmental changes in timing or spatial tasks are simply due to changes in such cognitive factors.…”

Higher chronic stress is associated with a decrease in temporal sensitivity but not in subjective duration in healthy young men

“…Ample evidence suggests that chronic stress is associated with deficits in attention ( Caswell et al, 2003 ; Liston et al, 2009 ; Yuan et al, 2014 ), working memory ( Mika et al, 2012 ; Corrêa et al, 2015 ), and long-term memory ( Lovell et al, 2014 ; Corrêa et al, 2015 ), as well as atrophy and dysfunctional changes in corresponding brain regions, such as the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus ( McEwen, 2004 ; Ulrich-Lai and Herman, 2009 ). These neural functions are critical to the cognitive mechanisms underlying temporal sensitivity ( Church, 1984 ; Wearden et al, 1997 ; Zakay and Block, 1997 ; Grondin, 2010 ; Zelanti and Droit-Volet, 2011 ; Droit-Volet and Zelanti, 2013 ), and their impairment under chronic stress may explain the negative correlation between chronic stress and temporal sensitivity.…”