Younger adults are more prosocial than older adults in economic decision making results from the give and take game.

The present study was designed to investigate the disadvantageous and advantageous inequity aversion of young and older adults in situations which allowed them to maximize or minimize payoff inequalities. Given the very limited evidence regarding an actual age-related effect on inequity aversion, the purpose of this study was to examine this question using an economic game, "the Give-and-Take Game", which is able to circumvent certain limitations of the Ultimatum Game, to evaluate inequity aversion (i.e., a same behaviour which can be induced by opposite motivations: prosocial vs. pro-self vs. altruistic orientations). In the "Give-and-Take Game", a sum of money was randomly distributed between the participant and a dummy player. These distributions created monetary inequalities, advantageous either for the participant (to examine advantageous inequity aversion) or for the other player (to examine disadvantageous inequity aversion). Different response options were proposed to the participants to either maximize or minimize payoff inequalities between the players. This procedure not only allowed to differentiate individual's profiles with more prosocial vs. pro-self vs. altruistic orientations, but also to examine age-related effects on these profiles. The results showed that older adults showed a more important pro-self orientation compared to their younger counterparts. They more frequently selected the options which maximized their own payoffs and were less averse to advantageous inequity compared to young adults. In contrast, young adults showed a similar level of advantageous and disadvantageous inequity aversion. Older adults focused on the economic and competitive dimension of the game, which may have motivated them to maximize their own payoffs. Conversely, young adults took into account the social dimension of the game, focusing on a fair monetary distribution.

Deficits of duration estimation in individuals aged 10-20 years old with idiopathic mild intellectual disability: The role of updating working memory.

Duration estimation is a conceptual ability that plays a crucial role in human behaviour. Impairments in duration estimation ability have a significant impact on daily autonomy and social and cognitive capacities, even more so in psychological disorders. It has been recently shown that the ability to estimate durations develops at a slower pace in individuals with mild intellectual disability (MID) compared with typically developing (TD) individuals. More generally, it has been also demonstrated that duration estimation requires working memory updating. In this study, we compared the duration estimation and updating performances of individuals aged 10-20 years with idiopathic MID without associated disorders to those of typical individuals of the same ages (N = 160). Our results highlight a developmental lag not only in the capacity to estimate short durations (<1 s) in individuals with idiopathic MID, both in a bisection task and in a reproduction task, but also in working memory updating capacity. The findings also emphasise-for the first time-the importance of updating for both the age-related increase in duration estimation capacities and the deficits of these capacities in idiopathic MID. This is consistent with the hypothesis that duration estimation deficits in idiopathic MID may be due, to a large extent, to lower updating abilities.

Duration judgments in children and adolescents with and without mild intellectual disability.

BACKGROUND: While the ability to measure time correctly is crucial for adaptation to the external physical and social environment, to date, research on timing ability and its development in individuals with intellectual disability (ID) is unfortunately remarkably scarce. AIMS: In the present study, we investigated the ability of individuals with mild ID to estimate durations and the development of this ability from 11 to 19 years, in comparison to typically developing (TD) individuals. METHODS AND PROCEDURES: Participants with mild ID and TD participants matched on chronological age completed two temporal tasks: (1) a temporal bisection of auditory stimuli, in which they had to decide whether arbitrary stimulus duration was more similar to the short (200 ms) or the long (800 ms) standard previously learned, and (2) a temporal categorization of familiar actions, in which short, medium or long target durations had to be paired with one of three comparison action durations. OUTCOMES AND RESULTS: Temporal performance was systematically impaired in participants with mild ID. Moreover, the temporal impairment increased with age in the bisection task but not in the categorization task. CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS: These findings suggest that the ability to estimate durations develops at a slower pace in individuals with mild ID compared to TD individuals.

Age-related changes in duration production for familiar actions.

The present study dealt with an aspect of temporal cognition that is rarely discussed in the literature: the ability to estimate the duration of familiar actions. In everyday life, we often have to process both very short durations (e.g., when we are driving), but we also have to deal with actions or events that last for several minutes or even hours (e.g., watching a film). The aim of our study was to examine whether young children aged six and 9 years and adults are able to estimate the time usually taken by various familiar actions to perform using a production task. More precisely, they were successively presented with photographs of familiar actions that usually take more (e.g., blown a balloon up) or less (e.g., blow a candle out) time to perform. As soon as a photograph was presented on the screen, they have to start estimating the time taken to perform the depicted action and press the space bar when they think that this time has elapsed. Results showed that the 6-year-olds failed to produce longer durations for the long action category than for the short one, unlike the older children and adults. Moreover, for the short action category, increasingly short durations were produced with age. Only the adults produced different durations for different actions belonging to the same category (i.e., short or long). These results are discussed in relation to the development of an event-based system of time that can be used to solve duration tasks. Statement of contribution What is already known on this subject? Young children understand the relative durations of daily actions. There is not any mapping between duration words and approximate durations in young children. Young children have great difficulty in understanding that the same duration can be shared by different actions. What the present study adds? There is a clear improvement with age in the ability to produce the durations of familiar actions. Children can use the event-based system of time they develop to successfully perform duration tasks.

Being the chosen one: social inclusion modulates decisions in the ultimatum game. An ERP study.

In the present study, participants played a modified ultimatum game simulating a situation of inclusion/exclusion, in which either the participant or a rival could be selected to play as the responder. This selection was made either randomly by a computer (i.e. random pairing mode) or by the proposer (i.e. choice mode), based on physical appearance. Being chosen by the proposer triggered positive reciprocal behavior in participants, who accepted unfair offers more frequently than when they had been selected by the computer. Independently of selection mode, greater P200 amplitudes were found when participants received fair offers than when they received unfair offers and when unfair shares were offered to their rivals rather than to them, suggesting that receiving fair offers or observing a rival's misfortune was rewarding for participants. While participants generally showed more interest in the offers they themselves received (i.e. greater P300 responses to these offers), observing their rivals receive fair shares after the latter had been chosen by the proposer triggered an increase in P300 amplitude likely to reflect a feeling of envy. This study provides new insights into both the cognitive and affective processes underpinning economic decision making in a context of social inclusion/exclusion.

Time flies faster under time pressure.

We examined the effects of time pressure on duration estimation in a verbal estimation task and a production task. In both temporal tasks, participants had to solve mazes in two conditions of time pressure (with or without), and with three different target durations (30 s, 60 s, and 90 s). In each trial of the verbal estimation task, participants had to estimate in conventional time units (minutes and seconds) the amount of time that had elapsed since they started to solve the maze. In the production task, they had to press a key while solving the maze when they thought that the trial's duration had reached a target value. Results showed that in both tasks, durations were judged longer with time pressure than without it. However, this temporal overestimation under time pressure did not increase with the length of the target duration. These results are discussed within the framework of scalar expectancy theory.

Short-term memory for auditory and visual durations: evidence for selective interference effects.

The present study sought to determine the format in which visual, auditory and auditory-visual durations ranging from 400 to 600 ms are encoded and maintained in short-term memory, using suppression conditions. Participants compared two stimulus durations separated by an interval of 8 s. During this time, they performed either an articulatory suppression task, a visuospatial tracking task or no specific task at all (control condition). The results showed that the articulatory suppression task decreased recognition performance for auditory durations but not for visual or bimodal ones, whereas the visuospatial task decreased recognition performance for visual durations but not for auditory or bimodal ones. These findings support the modality-specific account of short-term memory for durations.

What is the best and easiest method of preventing counting in different temporal tasks?

The aim of the present study was to determine the best and easiest method of suppressing spontaneous counting in a temporal judgment task. Three classic methods used to avoid counting--instructions not to count, articulatory suppression, and administration of an interference task--were tested in temporal generalization, bisection, and reproduction tasks with two duration ranges (1-4 and 2-8 s). All the three no-counting conditions prevented participants from counting, counting leading to estimates that were more accurate and less variable and to violations of the fundamental scalar property of timing. With regard to the differences between the no-counting conditions, the interference task distorted time perception more strongly and increased variability in temporal estimates to a greater extent than did articulatory suppression, as well as the no-counting instructions condition. In addition, articulatory suppression produced more noise in behavioral outcome than did the no-counting instruction condition. In sum, although all methods have disadvantages, the instructions not to count actually constitute the simplest and more efficient method of preventing counting in timing tasks. However, further studies must now concentrate on the role of explicit instructions in our experience of perception.

Modulating the interference effect in timing with varying stimulus onset asynchrony.

The interference effect on time judgments, when subjects are also required to perform a concurrent nontemporal task, is one of the most reliable findings in the time perception literature. In the present study, the interference between a time discrimination task (short or long tone) and a digit classification task (even or odd digit) was analysed using the overlapping tasks paradigm. Reaction times in the digit task were shorter at longer values of stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) in Experiment 1, showing a clear modulation of interference with varying the relative position of the tasks. Using longer tone durations in Experiment 2, reaction times in the digit task were affected not only by the overlap between the tasks but also by the temporal proximity of responses in the timing and digit tasks. In Experiment 3, the effect of varying the SOA on performance on the digit task was abolished when the auditory tone was irrelevant, thus eliminating an interpretation in terms of distraction from the tone offset. We conclude that the interference effect in concurrent time discrimination and digit classification may be modulated by the degree of overlap between the tasks as well as by the overlap between late processing stages related to decision and response components in the 2 tasks.

Temporal bisection in 4-month-old infants.

The present study was the first to investigate infants' ability to discriminate time using a bisection task that has been extensively used with animals and human adults. Infants aged 4 months were presented with two standard auditory signals, one short (S = 500 ms) and one long (L = 1,500 ms), and were trained either to look to the left after S and to the right after L, or vice versa. During the test phase, the infants were then presented with intermediate durations without reinforcement as well as the two reinforced standard durations, for which the reinforcement was either immediate or delayed of 3 s. The times spent by the infants looking to the right, left or away from the target after the stimulus duration were coded by two blind coders. The results revealed an orderly psychophysical function with the proportion of long responses increasing with signal duration. The point of subjective equality (Bisection Point) was closer to the geometric mean of the short and long standard duration than to their arithmetic mean. Modeling using the scalar timing models revealed that our infants had a relatively high sensitivity to time but that their temporal performance was affected by the fact that they made a large number of random responses. The development of the perception of time is discussed in the light of similarities and differences in temporal bisection performance between different species (rats and humans) and the different levels of development observed within a given species.

The effects of interference and retention delay on temporal generalization performance.

This study investigated the effect of forgetting of the standard duration on temporal discrimination in a generalization task. In two experiments, participants were given a temporal generalization task with or without a retention delay between the learning of the standard duration and the testing of the comparison durations. During this delay, they either performed or did not perform an interference task. Results failed to reveal any effect of 15-min and 24-h retention delays on time judgments (Experiment 1). However, when an interference task was performed during the 15-min delay (Experiment 2), there was a subjective shortening effect, indicating that the standard duration was judged shorter with than without an interference task. These findings suggest that when an interference task occurs immediately after initial temporal encoding, it affects the process of consolidation in reference memory.

Bidirectional interference between timing and concurrent memory processing in children.

This study investigated the nature of resources involved in duration processing in 5- and 8-year-olds. The children were asked to reproduce the duration of a visual or auditory stimulus. They performed this task either alone or concurrently with an executive task (Experiment 1) or with a digit or visuospatial memory task (Experiment 2). The results showed that duration reproduction was systematically shorter in the dual-task condition than in the single-task one. Furthermore, timing an auditory stimulus decreased the proportion of accurate responses in the executive and digit memory tasks but not in the visuospatial memory task, whereas timing a visual stimulus decreased the proportion of accurate responses in the executive and visuospatial memory tasks but not in the digit memory task, at least to a lesser extent in the older children. This pattern of interference suggests that duration reproduction in children requires both the central executive and the slave memory system associated with the modality of the temporal stimulus.

A further analysis of time bisection behavior in children with and without reference memory: the similarity and the partition task.

Experiment 1 compared the temporal performance of 5-year-olds, 8-year-olds and adults in a bisection task with and without referent durations (similarity vs. partition). The results showed that temporal sensitivity was lower in the partition than in the similarity condition in children, whereas it was similar in these two conditions in the adults. In addition, the 5-year-olds produced a higher bisection point value in the partition than in the similarity task. Experiment 2, which examined changes in bisection performance over the trial blocks in the partition task, revealed that the 5-year-olds' bisection performance improved over the trial blocks, whereas the performance of the older participants did not. Further analyses revealed a greater variability in the establishment of the duration criterion in young children.

The long-term retention of time: a developmental study.

Two experiments investigated the age-related changes in long-term retention of duration and their effects on time judgement. Children aged 3, 5, and 8 years old were given a temporal bisection task with or without a 15-min interfering task (Experiment 1), or a retention delay lasting for 0 min, 15 min, or 24 hr (Experiment 2) between the presentation of the standard durations and the comparison stimulus durations. An interfering task and the increase of the retention delay significantly decreased the time sensitivity in the 3- and the 5-year-olds, and to a greater extent in the younger children, but had no effect in the 8-year-olds. This decrease in time sensitivity with the interfering task or the retention delay might be due to an increase in the variability of the remembered duration.