Abstract
Reliable duration perception of external events is necessary to coordinate between perception and action. The dominance of the auditory modality in temporal perception can exert influence on visual duration judgments. For instance, the duration of a visual stimulus appears expanded or compressed when paired with longer or shorter auditory stimuli, respectively, as compared to it’s perceived duration when presented alone (i.e. standard visual stimulus). With increasing auditory-visual duration differences, the effect attenuates in young adults. As individual sensory systems deteriorate with age, it is imperative to assess how aging changes cross-modal duration perception. In the current study, we examined the effect of aging on 1) duration discrimination thresholds, 2) auditory temporal dominance, and 3) visual duration expansion/compression effects. Duration discrimination thresholds were significantly greater for visual than auditory in both age groups, however there was no age effect. Auditory modality retained dominance in duration perception with age, as expected due to decline of both sensory systems. Finally, both age groups perceived a similar compression effect of visual stimuli when paired with a shorter auditory stimulus. While visual expansion effects wore off in younger adults, this effect was maintained in older adults with duration differences up to 400 ms. Intriguingly, this extended expansion effect was dependent on the order of stimuli as it only occurred when the standard stimulus was presented before the test. The age-dependent order effect found here may provide insight into the variable weights innately given to successive events during duration processing and how weighting changes with age.