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

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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.