Time perception depends on accurate clock mechanisms as well as unimpaired attention and memory processes

Abstract

We report a series of studies aimed at characterizing the relationships between duration judgments and slowing down of the internal clock, attention and memory deficits. Different groups of participants (elderly people, patients with Parkinson's disease, patients with severe traumatic brain injury, and patients with temporal lobe lesions) performed a duration reproduction task and a duration production task in two conditions: a control counting condition and a concurrent reading condition. Participants were also administered reaction time tasks, tapping tasks, and a battery of attention and memory tests. The results allow us to characterize the relationships between cognitive deficits and impaired duration reproductions and productions in each group. Moreover, results as a whole clarify the respective weight of processing speed, attention and memory in both tasks, and allow better insight into the theoretical models of psychological time.