1,721,154 research outputs found

    Age-related changes in time production and reproduction tasks: Involvement of attention and working memory processes

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    Several studies have reported age-related differences in time estimation, which have been attributed either to a slowing of the pacemaker rate with aging or to impaired attention and/or working resources in older adults. Here, we compared performance of young and older participants on time production/reproduction tasks and on working memory, divided attention, sustained attention and executive attention tasks. Results showed that relative to young participants, older adults significantly under-reproduced and tended to over-produce target durations. Neither attention nor working memory predicted time reproduction and production performance. Conversely, when temporal variability was considered, participants’ temporal variability in time production tasks was exclusively accounted for by age, whereas variability in temporal reproduction was also explained by divided attention and working memory. Overall, our results extend previous investigations on timing abilities in the elderly and underscore the importance of divided attention and working memory in the maintenance of a stable representation of durations

    Explicit and Implicit Timing Across the Adult Lifespan

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    The study of whether temporal processing in the millisecond-to-seconds range changes with age is an active and debated research field. Here, we adopted a lifespan approach in which younger to older participants performed both explicit and implicit timing tasks (time bisection and foreperiod tasks, respectively) in a single session. Three hundred seven participants (age range: 20–85 years) took part in the study. Participants performed two timing tasks to test explicit and implicit time processing. Age was used as a continuous predictor to elucidate whether explicit and implicit temporal processing change with increasing age. The results from the explicit timing task showed reduced precision with age, as indexed by a flatter psychometric curve and greater just noticeable difference metrics. By contrast, implicit processing of time was not significantly affected by age, as evinced by a comparable foreperiod effect across age. These findings provide first adult lifespan evidence that only explicit, but not implicit, timing is sensitive to age-related changes

    Right-lateralized intrinsic brain dynamics predict monitoring abilities

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    Intrinsic brain dynamics may play an important role in explaining interindividual variability in executive functions. In the present electroencephalography (EEG) study, we focused on the brain lateralization patterns predicting performance on three different monitoring tasks of temporal, verbal, and spatial nature. These tasks were administered to healthy young participants after their EEG was recorded during a resting state session. Behavioral indices of monitoring efficiency were computed for each task and a source-based spectral analysis was performed on participants' resting-state EEG activity. A lateralization index was then computed for each of 75 homologous cortical regions as the right-left difference score for the log-transformed power ratio between beta and alpha frequencies. Finally, skipped Pearson correlations between the lateralization index in each cortical region and behavioral performance of the three monitoring tasks were computed. An intersection among the three tasks showed that right-lateralization in different prefrontal regions, including the middle frontal gyrus, was positively correlated with monitoring abilities across the three tasks. In conclusion, right-lateralized brain mechanisms set the stage for the ability to monitor for targets in the environment, independently of the specific task characteristics. These mechanisms are grounded in hemispheric asymmetry dynamics already observable at rest

    Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis

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    The present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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