Aging Slows Access to Temporal Information From Working Memory.

Objectives: To evaluate the impact of aging on controlled memory search operations, we investigated the retrieval of temporal order information from working memory (WM).

Method: Young and older adults completed a relative judgments-of-recency (JOR) task. In each trial, participants studied 5-item lists and were presented with two probes from the study list.

Optimal time discrimination.

In the temporal bisection task, participants categorize experienced stimulus durations as short or long based on their similarity to previously acquired reference durations. Reward maximization in this task requires integrating endogenous timing uncertainty as well as exogenous probabilities of the reference durations into temporal judgements. We tested human participants on the temporal bisection task with different short and long reference duration probabilities (exogenous probability) in two separate test sessions.