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

时间感知缺陷与海马萎缩有关，在许多神经退行性疾病如阿尔茨海默氏痴呆症中都有报道。由于时间感知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在非常早期的阶段就识别出有风险的患者。据报道，在健康衰老过程中，定时行为的准确性也会下降，这与认知能力衰退的加速进展有关。然而，一个严重反对临床评估的时间知觉缺陷在其传统形式关注的生态效度所采用的任务。大多数实验和临床研究使用高度人工的刺激和场景，参与者必须判断抽象和通常非常短的刺激（如声音）的持续时间。将这些人工情境与现实生活中时间感知的相关性进行对比，结果在多大程度上可以推广到自然计时行为，以及这些人工任务在多大程度上反映了日常生活中的缺陷，这是值得怀疑的。在计划中的项目中，我想用一种生态有效的方法来评估时间感知缺陷。参与者将在虚拟现实中观察一个复杂的动态场景，并对所经历事件的时间方面做出回顾性判断，而不是比较抽象刺激的持续时间。这种新颖的事件计时程序对评估与年龄相关的计时行为缺陷具有深远的意义，并有可能促进早期诊断认知衰退的新临床工具的发展。

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.