The Experimental Research On Age-Related Difference In Judgments Of Duration

It is agreed that experimental and psychometric findings indicate age-related decrements in the ability to learn and remember. It is also agreed that not all types of memory show equal age deficits. Memories that were well established earlier in life and that are regularly retrieved (i.e. semantic memories) frequently show minimal decrease in retrieval in old adults. Even some forms of new memory formation (e.g., implicit memory) are relatively spared from aging decrements. Furthermore, there is consensus that some noncognitive and situational factors can modulate the degree to which age-related difference are seen in memory tasks.The ami of this research was to find the age-related difference hi temporal memory. With a brief overview of theoretical approaches to the study of judgment of duration and aging, the temporal memory formation should be more sensitive to aging than others.The present experiments investigated the age-related difference of old adults and young adults. Under prospective paradigms, the participants were asked to estimate three durations (5,13 or 26s) in two different method of judgment (reproduction and production) while made single task (experiment 1), perceptual judgments (experiment 2) and process-depth task (experiment 3).Under retrospective paradigms, storage size (experiment 4), segment level (experiment 5), and process-depth (experiment 6) were balanced to investigate age-related difference in the judgment of duration (9s) employed the methods of verbal estimate and reproduction.The results showed:1. The robust age-related effects were documented, with older adults showing a greatly exaggerated tendency to underestimate and overproduce intervals of tune under the presentexperimental conditions.2. Under dual-task conditions, old adults perceived the shorter duration than young adults.3. The age-related difference can be attributed to the limited resource in old adults under prospective paradigm.4 Under retrospective paradigm, temporal information can be used as source feature in episodic memory. Compared the content memory, Judgment of duration was more sensitive to aging.5. Under retrospective paradigm, the age-related difference was related to the deficits in episodic memory.6. Dissociation between memory system involved in reproduction (or verbal estimation) and production tasks. The range effect was found in our findings. Those indicated that various memory formations were involved in judgment of duration.7 The judgment of duration can used as a method of studying age-related difference in cognition.The reduced-resources approach to cognitive aging was used to integrate the present experimental findings. However, It is clear that there are no simple rules that can allow us to predict when age-related difference in memory will and will not occur, and if do, whether the difference will be small, modest, or large. In order to understand and interpret the age-related difference in duration judgment, behavioral, neurobiological and social variable must be taken into account. The synthetic approach should be employed to understand the age-related difference in judgment of duration in future.