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

时间知觉的缺陷与海马萎缩有关，并在许多神经退行性疾病如阿尔茨海默氏症中报道。由于时间知觉障碍可能发生在痴呆症的临床前阶段，因此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处于风险中的患者。健康老龄化也报告了计时行为的精确度下降，并与认知能力下降的加速进展有关，然而，对传统形式的时间知觉缺陷的临床评估的严重反对涉及所雇用任务的生态有效性。大多数实验和临床研究使用高度人工的刺激和场景，其中参与者必须判断抽象且通常非常短的刺激的持续时间（例如，声音）。对比这些人工的情况下，与现实生活中的时间知觉的相关性，这是值得怀疑的程度，结果可以推广到自然的计时行为，在何种程度上，这些人工任务捕捉日常生活中的损伤，在预期的项目，我想做的第一步，对时间知觉赤字的评估使用生态有效的方法。而不是比较抽象刺激的持续时间，参与者将观察虚拟现实中的复杂动态场景，并对所经历事件的时间方面进行回顾性判断。这种新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影响，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。

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.