$1 million grant funds study of how age affects timing

BOWLING GREEN, O. -- 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 Bowling Green State University psychologists will address with a new $1 million grant from the National Institute on Aging, one of the National Institutes of Health.

Dr. Kevin Pang, an associate professor of psychology at BGSU, and Dr. J. Devin McAuley, an assistant professor, 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.

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 on 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.

(Posted April 2, 2003)