BRIEF RESEARCH REPORT article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Cognition
This article is part of the Research TopicBridging the Divide: Understanding Phasic Alertness and Temporal PreparationView all 3 articles
Age-Related Differences in Implicit Temporal Preparation
Provisionally accepted
- North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, Greensboro, United States
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Abstract Healthy aging is commonly associated with cognitive changes in several domains. One process that has gained recent attention in the context of cognitive aging is temporal processing of information and preparation for action. The current study aimed to extend recent findings showing that implicit timing ability, or the ability to process temporal information and act when not instructed to attend to time, might be spared in older adulthood. Across two independent studies, younger and older adults completed a simple reaction time task in which a variable foreperiod duration was presented on every trial. I analyzed two aspects of temporal preparation ability, the more controlled "variable" foreperiod effect and the more automatic "sequential" foreperiod effect to see if either of these aspects might be affected by age. In both studies, older adults demonstrated consistent slowing of responses. In terms of indices of temporal ability, however, both younger and older adults showed similar patterns. Older adults showed similar levels of their variable and sequential foreperiod effects compared to younger adults. These findings suggest that implicit timing ability appears relatively unaffected by healthy aging and add to the growing body of literature to better understand foreperiod effects and response timing more broadly. Keywords: temporal preparation, foreperiod effect, sequential effects, reaction time, age-related differences
Keywords: age-related differences, foreperiod effect, Reaction Time, sequential effects, temporal preparation
Received: 28 Oct 2025; Accepted: 13 Feb 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Welhaf. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Matthew S Welhaf
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