ABSTRACT
A more direct test than inferring older and younger people’s tracking of events from their reaction times is to directly ask them to estimate durations of brief time intervals. Apart from changes in the brain, many, more general, alterations in the state of our bodies must alter the accuracy of our perceptions of short periods of time. Judging the durations of very brief periods, of the order of seconds or milliseconds, is an unsatisfying way to explore the general elderly experience of a subjectively accelerating world. Not all events are equally striking or equally well remembered and so equally easy to place in the correct time sequence. A more important issue is the difference between judging whether time, at this current moment, is passing rapidly or slowly and whether a designated past period of life now seems to have gone by fast or lethargically.
