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    Duration, numerosity and length processing in healthy ageing and Parkinson's disease

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    : People constantly process temporal, numerical, and length information in everyday activities and interactions with the environment. However, it is unclear whether quantity perception changes during ageing. Previous studies have provided heterogeneous results, sometimes showing an age-related effect on a particular quantity, and other times reporting no differences between young and elderly samples. However, three dimensions were never compared within the same study. Here, we conducted two experiments with the aim of investigating the processing of duration, numerosity and length in both healthy and pathological ageing. The experimental paradigm consisted of three bisection tasks in which participants were asked to judge whether the presented stimulus (i.e. a time interval, a group of dots, or a line) was more similar to the short/few or long/many standards. The first study recruited healthy young and elderly participants, while the second recruited healthy elderly participants and patients with Parkinson's disease, a clinical condition commonly associated with temporal impairments. The results of both experiments showed that discrimination precision differed between domains in all groups, with higher precision in the numerosity task and lower sensitivity in judging duration. Furthermore, while discrimination abilities were affected in healthy elderly and, even more so, in Parkinson's disease group, no domain-specific impairments emerged. According to our research, reduced discrimination precision might be explained by an alteration of a single system for all quantities or by an age-related general cognitive decline

    Do the young and the old perceive emotional intervals differently when shown on a younger or older face?

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    Many authors have analysed the effects of emotion recognition on time perception, showing that the more arousing the stimuli are the greater is the effect on duration perception. Visual stimuli, in particular faces, are the most recurrent stimuli employed in the literature. However, pictures in which emotional faces of older individuals have rarely been used, and when used, only young participants were tested. Hence, the present study is designed not only to analyse differences as regards duration perception in younger and older participants, but also to investigate the effects of neutral, happy, and angry facial expressions on younger and older participants when younger or older faces express those emotions. Results showed overestimation when emotional stimuli were presented. Interestingly, we observed temporal underestimation when the temporal intervals were marked by the image of younger participants and this was true in particular for older adults participants. Results are discussed in accordance with the internal clock model and in accordance with an inferential/reconstructive process occurring in memory and acting on temporal judgments
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