Healthy aging is commonly associated with cognitive changes in several domains. One process that has gained recent attention in the context of cognitive aging is temporal processing of information and preparation for action. The current study aimed to extend recent findings showing that implicit timing ability, or the ability to process temporal information and act when not instructed to attend to time, might be spared in older adulthood. Across two independent studies, younger and older adults completed a simple reaction time task in which a variable foreperiod duration was presented on every trial. I analyzed two aspects of temporal preparation ability, the more controlled “variable” foreperiod effect and the more automatic “sequential” foreperiod effect to see if either of these aspects might be affected by age. In both studies, older adults demonstrated consistent slowing of responses. In terms of indices of temporal ability, however, both younger and older adults showed similar patterns. Older adults showed similar levels of their variable and sequential foreperiod effects compared to younger adults. These findings suggest that implicit timing ability appears relatively unaffected by healthy aging and add to the growing body of literature to better understand foreperiod effects and response timing more broadly.
Matthew S. Welhaf (Mon,) studied this question.