Presentation Information
[P3-08]Aging effect on temporal processing: an ongoing study on retrospective timing and spontaneous oscillatory bursts.
*Florentine Fricker1, Giulia Buzi1, Maëlys Morantin1, Franck Doidy1, Patrice Clochon1, Raphaël Bordas2, Virginie van Wassenhove2, Thomas Hinault1 (1. Université de Caen Normandie, INSERM, EPHE-PSL, PSL University, CHU de Caen, GIP Cyceron, U1077, NIMH, 14000 Caen, France. (France), 2. Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit, INSERM, CEA, Université Paris-Saclay, NeuroSpin, 91191 Gif/Yvette, France. (France))
Keywords:
Timing,Retrospective,EEG,Aging,Burst
In most daily-life activities, our attention is not explicitly oriented toward the temporal dimension of the environment, and we mainly rely on retrospective estimates of time passage. As our sense of time undergoes profound changes with advancing age, we investigated age-related cognitive and neural changes in retrospective duration estimates. To this end, participants estimated the duration after the task, without prior knowledge that time would be relevant, thus relying on a memory-based reconstruction of past events. We compared the EEG oscillatory activity of 40 young (aged 20–35) and 40 older (aged 60–80) healthy adults during a 4-minute rest, followed by a retrospective time estimate (rTE) and cognitive assessment. Building on prior findings that alpha (α: 8–12 Hz) burst activity correlates with rTE in young adults (Azizi et al., 2023), we used a cycle-by-cycle analysis (Cole & Voytek, 2019) to replicate and extend these results to theta (θ: 4–8 Hz) to account for the age-related slowing of neural activity (Courtney & Hinault, 2021). Preliminary results (N = 48, including 22 older adults) revealed that while both groups showed similar behavioral estimates, α-burst activity was significantly lower in young adults relative to older adults (F(1,46) = 4.67, p = .036), but not for theta (p = .29). Interestingly, rTE was positively correlated with working memory (N-Back: r = .33, p = .030) and associative memory (Fast Mapping recall: r = .36, p = .015) performance. However, no significant correlation was observed between rTE and alpha or theta bursts. Ongoing data collection and analysis of intracranial EEG will help refine these trends at a finer scale. These findings offer a new approach to investigating temporal processing changes with advancing age. Timing, often overlooked, is deeply intertwined with cognition. Understanding its neural underpinnings may thus provide a unique window into age-related changes.