Time perception in real-life scenarios and its value for clinical diagnostics of early-stage dementia

现实场景中的时间感知及其对早期痴呆的临床诊断价值

• 批准号: 411006663
• 负责人: Dr. Martin Riemer
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Faculty of Behavioural and Social Sciences
• 依托单位国家: 德国
• 项目类别: Research Fellowships
• 财政年份: 2018
• 资助国家: 德国
• 起止时间: 2017-12-31 至 2020-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/411006663?language=en
• 关键词: Time; perception; real; life; scenarios

Deficits in time perception have been associated with hippocampal atrophy and reported in many neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s dementia. As time perception impairments can occur at a preclinical stage of dementia, clinical assessment of timing deficits might help to identify patients at risk already at a very early stage. Decrements in the precision of timing behavior were also reported for healthy aging and have been linked to an accelerated progress of cognitive decline.However, a serious objection to the clinical assessment of time perception deficits in its conventional form concerns the ecological validity of the employed tasks. Most experimental and clinical studies make use of highly artificial stimuli and scenarios, in which participants have to judge the duration of abstract and usually very short stimuli (e.g., sounds). Contrasting these artificial situations with the real-life relevance of time perception, it is questionable to which degree the results can be generalized to natural timing behavior and to which degree these artificial tasks capture the impairments in everyday life.In the intended project I want to make a first step towards an assessment of time perception deficits using an ecologically valid method. Instead of comparing the durations of abstract stimuli, participants will observe a complex dynamic scenario in virtual reality and make retrospective judgements on temporal aspects of the experienced events. This novel event timing procedure has far-reaching implications for the assessment of age-related deficits in timing behavior and the potential to promote the development of new clinical tools for an early diagnosis of cognitive decline.

时间知觉缺陷与海马体萎缩有关，并在许多神经退行性疾病中被报道，如阿尔茨海默氏症。由于时间知觉障碍可能发生在痴呆症的临床前阶段，对时间缺陷的临床评估可能有助于识别已经处于非常早期阶段的风险患者。时间行为的精确度下降也被报道为健康衰老，并与认知衰退的加速进展有关。然而，对传统形式的时间知觉缺陷的临床评估存在严重异议，涉及受雇任务的生态有效性。大多数实验和临床研究使用高度人工的刺激和情景，参与者必须判断抽象的、通常非常短的刺激(例如声音)的持续时间。将这些人工情景与时间知觉的现实相关性进行对比，结果在多大程度上可以概括为自然的计时行为，以及这些人工任务在多大程度上捕捉到了日常生活中的障碍，这是值得怀疑的。在预期的项目中，我想用一种生态上有效的方法来评估时间知觉缺陷。参与者不会比较抽象刺激的持续时间，而是在虚拟现实中观察复杂的动态场景，并对经历的事件的时间方面做出回溯性判断。这一新的事件计时程序对于评估年龄相关的计时行为缺陷具有深远的意义，并有可能促进新的临床工具的开发，以早期诊断认知能力下降。