# Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease impairs temporal precision

## TL;DR

This paper finds that Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases consistently impair the ability to judge time accurately and precisely.

## Contribution

The study shows that temporal precision is consistently impaired in Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease across diverse timing tasks.

## Key findings

- Temporal precision is reliably impaired in Parkinson’s disease across multiple studies.
- Temporal precision is also impaired in Alzheimer’s disease, despite varied timing paradigms.
- Temporal accuracy remains unaffected in both diseases.

## Abstract

Several studies have reported temporal processing deficits in neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease. These deficits can be quantified by interval timing paradigms that require participants to estimate or produce an interval of several seconds and require working memory for temporal rules as well as attention to time. Timing performance can be quantified by a variety of measures; however, two relatively universal metrics include: 1) temporal accuracy, defined as the mean temporal estimate and 2) temporal precision, reflected by the variability of temporal estimates. We examined temporal accuracy and precision in a meta-analysis of 14 studies in patients with Parkinson’s disease and 10 studies in patients with Alzheimer’s disease. Strikingly, in both diseases, temporal precision was reliably impaired across studies, while temporal accuracy was not. Our meta-analysis suggests that despite the diversity of interval timing paradigms and the complexity of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease, temporal precision is consistently impaired in these diseases. These results advance interval timing as a reliable assay to study cognitive dysfunction in Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease and may extend to other neurological and psychiatric disorders.