Aging effects on retrospective and naturalistic encoding of time and their relationship with memory.
- 1Inserm
Abstract
In everyday life, attention is not explicitly directed toward time. Yet, we can reconstruct how long an experience lasted from the memory traces it left behind, a process intertwined with episodic memory and subjective experience. As both memory and temporal processing change with advancing age, investigating aging effects could provide critical insights on these reconstructive processes. In this study, 31 younger (aged 24{+/-}3) and 36 older (aged 69{+/-}6) healthy adults completed two EEG sessions: 1) a resting-state recording followed by an unexpected retrospective time estimation, and 2) a video-based prospective duration estimation task where participants encoded and judged the duration of 50 naturalistic videos (2-32s) varying in eventfulness. Using a cycle-by-cycle burst analysis of alpha (: 8-12 Hz), we examined oscillatory correlates of both retrospective temporal judgement and prospective temporal processing. Behaviorally, both groups reconstructed short intervals similarly, but older adults produced longer prospective duration estimates than younger adults for longer video clips (16-32s), particularly under low-eventfulness. Regression analyses also showed that individual differences in older adults' prospective duration judgments were influenced by both their retrospective time estimation and episodic memory abilities, especially for longer videos. At the neural level, resting-state -burst dynamics were higher in older adults and predicted, with -power, longer retrospective estimates in older adults. Additionally, resting-state -burst activity predicted -burst during video encoding in both groups. Together, these findings reveal that individual -power and -burst dynamics could constitute memory-based time-tracking mechanism that aging reshapes in ways that manifest behaviorally under naturalistic conditions.
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BibTeX
@misc{fricker2026aging,
title = {{Aging effects on retrospective and naturalistic encoding of time and their relationship with memory.}},
author = {F. Fricker and G. Buzi and M. Morantin and F. Doidy and P. Clochon and R. Bordas and N. Leroy and A. d'Argembeau and V. van Wassenhove and T. T. Hinault},
howpublished = {bioRxiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.64898/2026.10.08.757302},
url = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.10.08.757302v1},
note = {CC BY-NC-ND},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Aging effects on retrospective and naturalistic encoding of time and their relationship with memory.
AU - F. Fricker
AU - G. Buzi
AU - M. Morantin
AU - F. Doidy
AU - P. Clochon
AU - R. Bordas
AU - N. Leroy
AU - A. d'Argembeau
AU - V. van Wassenhove
AU - T. T. Hinault
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/08
PB - bioRxiv
DO - 10.64898/2026.10.08.757302
UR - https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.10.08.757302v1
AB - In everyday life, attention is not explicitly directed toward time. Yet, we can reconstruct how long an experience lasted from the memory traces it left behind, a process intertwined with episodic memory and subjective experience. As both memory and temporal processing change with advancing age, investigating aging effects could provide critical insights on these reconstructive processes. In this study, 31 younger (aged 24{+/-}3) and 36 older (aged 69{+/-}6) healthy adults completed two EEG sessions: 1) a resting-state recording followed by an unexpected retrospective time estimation, and 2) a video-based prospective duration estimation task where participants encoded and judged the duration of 50 naturalistic videos (2-32s) varying in eventfulness. Using a cycle-by-cycle burst analysis of alpha (: 8-12 Hz), we examined oscillatory correlates of both retrospective temporal judgement and prospective temporal processing. Behaviorally, both groups reconstructed short intervals similarly, but older adults produced longer prospective duration estimates than younger adults for longer video clips (16-32s), particularly under low-eventfulness. Regression analyses also showed that individual differences in older adults' prospective duration judgments were influenced by both their retrospective time estimation and episodic memory abilities, especially for longer videos. At the neural level, resting-state -burst dynamics were higher in older adults and predicted, with -power, longer retrospective estimates in older adults. Additionally, resting-state -burst activity predicted -burst during video encoding in both groups. Together, these findings reveal that individual -power and -burst dynamics could constitute memory-based time-tracking mechanism that aging reshapes in ways that manifest behaviorally under naturalistic conditions.
ER -