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BGSU psychologists
engaged in study of how age affects people’s timing
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Kevin
Pang
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You’re
approaching a red stoplight from a distance, and somehow you
know just how much to slow your car to time the light’s
change to green without having to stop completely before re-accelerating.
Or, conversely, the light is changing from green to yellow,
and something inside tells you whether you have time to continue
through the intersection—or need to stop for the coming
red light.
What gives us this innate sense of timing? Where is our internal
clock, and how does it work? Those are among the questions that
two BGSU psychologists will address with a new $1 million grant
from the National Institute on Aging, one of the National Institutes
of Health.
Kevin Pang and J. Devin McAuley, both psychology,
will study the effects of aging on timing in both humans and
animals. That’s a unique aspect of the five-year grant,
said McAuley, calling it one of the few studies to attempt to
match the two subjects.
Pang, who uses rats in his neuroscience research, and McAuley,
who works primarily with people, will try to understand the
neural basis of timing behavior in animals and the implications
for humans.
Looking at how aging affects performance, they hope to collect
behavioral data from humans and rats using identical procedures.
Studies with rats will also examine the brain regions responsible
for age-related impairments. The psychologists will focus on
a brain area that uses the chemical called acetylcholine, which
is destroyed in Alzheimer’s disease. If they can pinpoint
the brain alterations that correspond with changes in timing
behavior, there may be therapeutic applications eventually,
Pang said.
Attention is also part of the research equation because a large
part of timing requires attention, and if it’s diverted,
timing perception becomes less accurate, he added.
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J.
Devin McAuley
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Most human behaviors
require some sense of timing, McAuley said, citing people’s
response to music as another example. “There’s only
so slow you can play a piece of music until rhythm breaks down
and you can’t dance anymore,” he pointed out.
Research of timing’s neural basis has increased in the
last 10 years, producing various proposals about the location
of our internal clock and how it functions, he said.
One view is that the clock can be localized in a specific way
and, started and stopped like a stopwatch, passively times events
independently. Estimates of duration are based upon this timing
and can be stored in memory for retrieval when people need them,
McAuley explained.
Another view holds that the clock is like an oscillator that
can’t be localized, he continued. It’s a rhythm in
the brain that synchronizes with events and gives people information
about how long those events last, including information about
whether the events are speeding up or slowing down, according
to this theory.
Both views may be correct but for different time scales, according
to Pang, who said that timing questions will be answered in
the long run with the help of brain imaging.
The new grant is the fourth to Pang from the National Institutes
of Health. Another active NIH award, to study the brain chemistry
important for memory, has implications for Alzheimer’s
and is for $800,000 over four years, while two previous grants
totaled about $550,000.
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