Reduced timing abilities have been reported in older adults and are associated with pathological cognitive decline. However, time perception experiments often lack ecological validity. Especially the reduced complexity of experimental stimuli and the participants’ awareness of the time-related nature of the task can influence lab-assessed timing performance and thereby conceal age-related differences. An approximation of more naturalistic paradigms can provide important information about age-related changes in timing abilities.

To determine the impact of higher ecological validity on timing experiments, we implemented a paradigm that allowed us to test (i) the effect of embedding the to-be-timed stimuli within a naturalistic visual scene, and (ii) the effect of retrospective time judgments, which are more common in real life than prospective judgments.

The results show that, compared to out-of-context stimuli, younger adults benefit from a naturalistic embedding of stimuli (reflected in higher precision and less errors), whereas the performance of older adults is reduced when confronted with naturalistic stimuli. Differences between retrospective and prospective time judgments were not modulated by age. We conclude that, potentially driven by difficulties in suppressing temporally irrelevant environmental information, the contextual embedding of naturalistic stimuli can affect the degree to which age influences the performance in time perception tasks.

据报道，老年人的计时能力下降，并且与病理性认知能力下降有关。然而，时间感知实验往往缺乏生态有效性。特别是实验刺激复杂性的降低以及参与者对任务与时间相关的性质的认识可以影响实验室评估的计时表现，从而掩盖与年龄相关的差异。更自然主义范式的近似可以提供有关计时能力与年龄相关的变化的重要信息。

为了确定更高的生态有效性对计时实验的影响，我们实施了一个范式，使我们能够测试（i）在自然视觉场景中嵌入待计时刺激的效果，以及（ii）回顾时间的效果判断，在现实生活中比预期判断更常见。

结果表明，与脱离情境的刺激相比，年轻人受益于自然主义嵌入的刺激（体现在更高的精度和更少的错误），而老年人在面对自然主义刺激时表现会下降。回顾性和前瞻性时间判断之间的差异不受年龄的影响。我们的结论是，由于抑制时间上不相关的环境信息的困难，自然刺激的上下文嵌入可能会影响年龄对时间感知任务表现的影响程度。