2009 Articles

Evidence for Age-related Changes to Temporal Attention and Memory from the Choice Time Production Task

Gooch, Cynthia M.; Stern, Yaakov; Rakitin, Brian C.

The effect of aging on interval timing was examined using a choice time production task, which required participants to choose a key response based on the location of the stimulus, but to delay responding until after a learned time interval. Experiment 1 varied attentional demands of the response choice portion of the task by varying difficulty of stimulus-response mapping. Choice difficulty affected temporal accuracy equally in both age groups, but older participants’ response latencies were more variable under more difficult response choice conditions. Experiment 2 tested the contribution of long-term memory to differences in choice time production between age groups over 3 days of testing. Direction of errors in time production between the two age groups diverged over the 3 sessions, but variability did not differ. Results from each experiment separately show agerelated changes to attention and memory in temporal processing using different measures and manipulations in the same task.