John Harold Weardeni (Keele University, UK) avalik loeng "Does time really seem to go faster as you get older? Time perception and time experience in older people in the laboratory and the world outside"

15. oktoobril 2014 kell 10.15 - 12.00 TÜ peahoones aud. 128 peab John Harold Wearden (Keele University, UK) avaliku loengu "Does time really seem to go faster as you get older? Time perception and time experience in older people in the laboratory and the world outside"

It’s a commonplace saying, at least in the UK, that “time seems to go faster as you get older”, with people complaining, for example, that “Christmas comes round quicker every year”. In this talk I examine evidence from laboratory studies and from studies of real-life time experience about possible changes in time perception with ageing. Laboratory studies of performance on a range of timing tasks in fact find only small differences in time perception between older people (e.g. 60+) and student-age comparison groups. The effects obtained mostly manifest themselves in terms of increased variability of performance, rather than any marked differences between timing in older and younger groups. In addition, what changes there are might be more related to changes in “general” cognitive performance, such as effects of ageing on attention, memory, or IQ, than on changes in time perception per se. Turning to time experience in the elderly, two fairly recent questionnaire studies in fact find virtually no evidence that older people judge that time is going faster when this question is asked systematically. In addition, a recent study using Experience Sampling Methodology, which examined time experience in daily life, found rather complex effects of ageing on experienced time, but certainly no clear-cut evidence for “speeding up” of time in an older group. Only one method, invented by Lemlich, which (I will argue) is highly suspect methodologically, produces consistent evidence for changes in the “speed of time” with age. This whole body of work presents a challenge for psychologists. Is the phenomenon of time speeding up with age real, but for some reason the tasks we use are unable to measure the effect, or is it in some way illusory?