Title:
Development of time sensitivity: Duration ratios in time bisection
Authors:
Droit-Volet, S; Zelanti, P
Source:
*QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY*, 66 (4):671-686; APR 1 2013
Abstract:
This study investigated the development of children's abilities to
discriminate durations as a function of their ratio and examined whether
the ability to discriminate durations that differed by a very difficult
ratio is related to the development of attention capacities. Children
aged 5 and 8 years, as well as adults, performed a series of temporal
bisection tasks with a ratio between the short and the long anchor
duration that was changed to control the difficulty of the task (5:6,
2:3, and 1:2) in two duration ranges (<1 s and >3 s). In addition, they
completed neuropsychological tests in order to assess their short-term
memory, working memory, and visual attention abilities. The results
showed that, at ratios of 2:3 and 1:2, most participants were able to
discriminate the anchor durations in bisection. However, their
sensitivity to time improved, whatever the duration range, both as the
distance between the anchor durations increased and with increasing age.
For the smallest duration ratio (5:6), few of the children were able to
discriminate the anchor durations in the bisection task in comparison to
adults. Hierarchical regression analyses performed on the
neuropsychological tests revealed that, for the 2:3 ratio between anchor
durations, the participants' visual attention scores explained a large
part of the variance in time sensitivity. The children's lower temporal
sensitivity was probably due to their limited visual attention
abilities, thus explaining the difficulty they experienced in
discriminating very close durations (5:6).
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