The perception of temporal intervals changes during the life-span, and especially older adults demonstrate specific impairments of timing abilities. Recently, we demonstrated that timing performance and cognitive status are correlated in older adults, suggesting that timing tasks can serve as a behavioral marker for the development of dementia. Easy-to-administer and retest-capable timing tasks therefore have potential as diagnostic tools for tracking cognitive decline. However, before being tested in a clinical cohort study, a further validation and specification of the original findings is warranted. Here we introduce several modifications of the original task and investigated the effects of temporal context on time perception in older adults (> 65 years) with low versus high scores in the Montreal Cognitive Assessment survey (MoCA) and a test of memory functioning. In line with our previous work, we found that temporal context effects were more pronounced with increasing memory deficits, but also that these effects are stronger for realistic compared to abstract visual stimuli. Furthermore, we show that two distinct temporal contexts influence timing behavior in separate experimental blocks, as well as in a mixed block in which both contexts are presented together. These results replicate and extend our previous findings. They demonstrate the stability of the effect for different stimulus material and show that timing tasks can reveal valuable information about the cognitive status of older adults. In the future, these findings could serve as a basis for the development of a diagnostic tool for pathological cognitive decline at an early, pre-clinical stage.

对时间间隔的感知在整个生命周期中会发生变化，尤其是老年人表现出计时能力的特定障碍。最近，我们证明了老年人的计时表现和认知状态是相关的，这表明计时任务可以作为痴呆症发展的行为标志。因此，易于管理和可重新测试的计时任务具有作为跟踪认知衰退的诊断工具的潜力。然而，在临床队列研究中进行测试之前，需要对原始发现进行​​进一步的验证和说明。在这里，我们介绍了对原始任务的一些修改，并研究了时间背景对老年人时间感知的影响（> 65 岁）在蒙特利尔认知评估调查 (MoCA) 和记忆功能测试中得分低与高。与我们之前的工作一致，我们发现时间上下文效应随着记忆缺陷的增加而更加明显，而且与抽象视觉刺激相比，这些效应对于现实的影响更强。此外，我们展示了两个不同的时间上下文影响单独的实验块中的时序行为，以及在两个上下文一起呈现的混合块中。这些结果复制并扩展了我们之前的发现。他们证明了不同刺激材料效果的稳定性，并表明计时任务可以揭示有关老年人认知状态的有价值信息。将来，