ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to organize the existing literature on older adults’ interval timing performance, that is, judgments about durations in the seconds-to-minutes range. In most cases, older adults’ timing distortions have certain characteristics that mark them as being the result of differences in attention and clock speed, rather than general performance declines or problems with memory or some other function. Most of the research on age differences in interval timing has focused on the role of attention, and much less is known about the influence of memory, processing speed, or other cognitive characteristics that change with age. Frequent attempts have been made to relate age differences in timing performance to age-related slowing, a topic of great interest in aging research. Age differences in timing may also affect performance on prospective memory tasks that require participants to remember to perform particular actions at particular times, or on executive control tasks that require the timing and sequencing of multiple actions.
