Temporal discrimination threshold with healthy aging.

ABSTRACT

The temporal discrimination threshold (TDT) is the shortest interstimulus interval at which a subject can perceive successive stimuli as separate. To investigate the effects of aging on TDT, we studied tactile TDT using the method of limits with 120% of sensory threshold in each hand for each of 100 healthy volunteers, equally divided among men and women, across 10 age groups, from 18 to 79 years. Linear regression analysis showed that age was significantly related to left-hand mean, right-hand mean, and mean of 2 hands with R-square equal to 0.08, 0.164, and 0.132, respectively. Reliability analysis indicated that the 3 measures had fair-to-good reliability (intraclass correlation coefficient 0.4-0.8). We conclude that TDT is affected by age and has fair-to-good reproducibility using our technique.