Ageing warps our perception of time: Study

Toronto: Older adults may have difficulty combining the stimuli they see and hear, much like trying to watch a video with the audio out of sync, and it could have implications for rapid decision-making tasks such as driving, a new study has found.

The study from the University of Waterloo in Canada found that seniors have a harder time distinguishing the order of events than younger adults.

When researchers presented them with both a light and sound at the same or different times, they found that young and older adults could determine whether they occurred simultaneously with similar accuracy.

However, when asked to determine which appeared first, the light or the sound, older adults performed much worse.

"To make sense of the world around us, the brain has to rapidly decide whether to combine different sources of information," said study senior author Michael Barnett-Cowan, a professor at the University of Waterloo.

"Older adults often experience problems processing multisensory information, which in turn can affect everyday tasks from following conversations, to driving, to maintaining balance," said Barnett-Cowan.

In another test, researchers showed the study participants two lights travelling towards one another.

Usually the lights appear to stream past each other, but when a sound occurs close to when the lights touch, they seem to bounce off each other.

In this test, older adults continued to perceive the lights as bouncing even when the sound occurred well before or after the lights touched, suggesting that older adults combine sensory information that should not belong together.

This is the first study to test multiple ways in which younger and older people combine sensory information in time.

The findings provide new hope that by strengthening the link between these brain processes as people age, the impairments in distinguishing the order of events and perceived collisions could reduce.

Possible solutions for improving impaired perceptions of time in the older adults could come from training using video games or brain stimulation.

"Health professionals are able to address many changes in our vision and hearing as we age using corrective lenses and hearing aids, for example," said Barnett-Cowan.

"But these interventions don't help with changes in the brain's ability to combine sensory information," said Barnett-Cowan.

"If we can identify and address impaired timing of events in the elderly, we could potentially improve the quality of life, safety and independence for many older people," he said.

The study was published in the journal Experimental Brain Research.