Abstract
There is auditory dominance compared to visual in temporal perception. However, it is unclear whether it is due to visual processing eliciting a higher demand of attentional resources. If higher attentional resources are required in the visual domain, it is expected that the performance would decline with age in relation to decreasing cognitive capacity. That is, with age, we expect to see a larger contrast between modalities such that the performance of visual modality has a larger decline, given that the auditory stimulus is within their hearing range. In experiment 1, we asked 15 old (Mean age =71.1; SD =4.02) and 15 young adults (Mean age =21.9; SD =2.67) to do a rhythmic reproduction task and reproduce temporal intervals of over and under one second marked by visual and auditory stimuli. We corroborated previous studies demonstrating that the visual domain was less accurate, and found that both modalities were equally precise in both age groups, despite older adults having more variability than their younger counterparts, irrespective of modality. In experiment 2, we added a working memory task to the temporal task to see how a higher demand in attentional load would affect the reproduction of visual stimuli in 15 old adults (Mean age =73.6; SD =3.33) compared to 15 young (Mean age =22.2; SD =2.14) adults. We hypothesized that the under-reproduction of visual stimuli would be intensified with age compared to the auditory modality. However, results showed that there were age-related differences in the modality in such a manner that unlike the younger, older adults performed better in the visual modality compared to the auditory modality. Moreover, the increased attentional load did not increase the level of noise in either modality. We will further discuss why this may be the case.