The impact of early aging on visual perception of space and time

Abstract

Visual perception of space and time has been shown to rely on context dependency, an inferential process by which the average magnitude of a series of stimuli previously experienced acts as a prior during perception. This article aims to investigate the presence and evolution of this phenomenon in early aging. Two groups of participants belonging to two different age ranges (Young Adults: average age 28.8 years old; Older Adults: average age 62.8 years old) participated in the study performing a discrimination and a reproduction task, both in a spatial and temporal conditions. In particular, they were asked to evaluate lengths in the spatial domain and interval durations in the temporal one. Early aging resulted to be associated to a general decline of the perceptual acuity, which is particularly evident in the temporal condition. The context dependency phenomenon was preserved also during aging, maintaining similar levels as those exhibited by the younger group in both space and time perception. However, the older group showed a greater variability in context dependency among participants, perhaps due to different strategies used to face a higher uncertainty in the perceptual process.

A novel method for estimating properties of attentional oscillators reveals an age-related decline in flexibility

“…A critical finding from the current study was that flexibility, estimated inversely from the strength of the effect of |–ΔIOI| on performance in both tasks with and without a motor component, decreased with age. Reduced performance in timing tasks for aging individuals is a common finding across perceptual ( Szymaszek et al, 2009 ; Incao et al, 2022 ; Henry et al, 2017 ) and motor ( Turgeon et al, 2011 ; von Schnehen et al, 2022 ) tasks. However, overall timing performance measures, namely, task averages of duration discrimination accuracy and tapping errors, showed no systematic relationships with individuals’ age, suggesting that age-related changes in rhythm perception might be specific to adaptive mechanisms rather than general timing abilities.…”

“…From the perceiver’s side, we chose to focus on how properties of internal oscillators change with advancing age. Studies assessing age-related changes in timing abilities show that older, as compared to younger individuals, produce slower tapping rates when asked to tap at a comfortable rate ( McAuley et al, 2006 ; Baudouin et al, 2004 ) and at the fastest rate ( Turgeon et al, 2011 ) they can maintain, show worse performance in temporal-order judgments ( Szymaszek et al, 2009 ), gap detection ( Fitzgibbons and Gordon-Salant, 1995 ) and discrimination and reproduction of time intervals ( Incao et al, 2022 ), and tend to prefer slower stimulus rates ( McAuley et al, 2006 ), which manifests in a breakdown in understanding fast speech. From an entrainment perspective, these findings suggest that internal oscillators of older individuals have slower preferred rates, reduced flexibility, or both.…”