What this means
Researchers compared how younger and older adults judged video length, and checked brain wave patterns. This is an early study, not yet checked by other scientists, so it cannot show what causes these differences.
Plain-English summary written by an AI model from the abstract. The original is below.
- Who it was tested in
- 31 younger adults and 36 older adults
- Kind of research
- Early results, not yet checked by other scientists
The science
- Original title
- Aging effects on retrospective and naturalistic encoding of time and their relationship with memory.
- Authors
- Fricker, F., Buzi, G., Morantin, M. et al.
- Journal
- bioRxiv (preprint, not yet peer reviewed)
- Published
- Oct 15, 2026
- Study type
- Preprint
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.
Fricker, F., Buzi, G., Morantin, M. et al. Aging effects on retrospective and naturalistic encoding of time and their relationship with memory. bioRxiv. 2026. doi:10.64898/2026.10.08.757302. https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.10.08.757302