Requena-Komuro, Maï-Carmen; (2022) Subjective time perception in healthy ageing and dementia. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

Our ability to experience the passage of time is fundamental to our lives. Consequently, disruptions to temporal processing may have adverse effects on the normal conduct of everyday life activities, particularly in the elderly. In fact, difficulties with temporal perception have been consistently described in healthy ageing and can be clinically significant in common dementias, such as Alzheimer’s disease and frontotemporal dementia syndromes. However, they remain poorly defined and have not been systematically compared. In this thesis, I describe several changes in subjective time perception resulting from healthy ageing and different neurodegenerative diseases by presenting behavioural and structural brain imaging evidence. In chapter 3, I demonstrate the modulation of perceived duration by the emotional and perceptual characteristics of a range of everyday life sounds and show that healthy ageing impacts the perceived duration of environmental sounds and overall duration discrimination sensitivity. In chapter 4, I present a remote testing protocol developed during the COVID-19 pandemic and show comparable performance to face-to-face testing on several neuropsychological and neurolinguistic tests for healthy control participants and patients diagnosed with canonical Alzheimer’s disease and frontotemporal dementia syndromes. In chapter 5, I evaluate the impact of these neurodegenerative diseases on timing abilities using the paradigm presented in chapter 3 and the remote testing protocol from chapter 4. I highlight differences in perceived duration and discrimination sensitivity that reflect syndromic characteristics and present neuroanatomical correlates that shed light on the mechanisms of time perception. In chapter 6, I establish distinct profiles of abnormal long-range temporal behaviours of everyday life in a similar dementia cohort and present the associated neuroanatomical substrates, furthering our understanding of temporal awareness. Overall, investigating subjective time perception in both healthy and pathological ageing opens a new avenue for a more quantitative, functional, and ecological approach to assessing ageing.

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