Ageing and temporal processing of durations within the psychological present

The predominant use of temporal information in everyday life concerns behav iour within the psychological present, which is said to have an upper limit of approximately 3-5 s. The present study was designed to investigate age differences in processing of temporal information within the psychological present by applying three distinct psychophysical tasks with base durations of I s. Forty young (mean age: 21.6 years) and forty older adults (mean ag e: 70.4 years) were presented with a temporal discrimination task, a tempor al reproduction task, and a repeated production task, Pronounced impairment in older adults, as compared to young adults, was found for temporal discr iminations. When asked to reproduce a 1-s target interval, young adults und er-reproduced and older adults over-reproduced the target duration, but did not differ in overall accuracy and intra-individual variability. Repeated productions of a 1-s interval were unaffected by age. These findings are co nsistent with the notion that older adults show impaired performance when s timulus timing is required, whereas response timing is unaffected by ageing .