Duration judgments in children and adolescents with and without mild intellectual disability

While the ability to measure time correctly is crucial for adaptation to the external physical and social environment, to date, research on timing ability and its development in individuals with intellectual disability (ID) is unfortunately remarkably scarce.

In the present study, we investigated the ability of individuals with mild ID to estimate durations and the development of this ability from 11 to 19 years, in comparison to typically developing (TD) individuals.

Participants with mild ID and TD participants matched on chronological age completed two temporal tasks: (1) a temporal bisection of auditory stimuli, in which they had to decide whether arbitrary stimulus duration was more similar to the short (200 ms) or the long (800 ms) standard previously learned, and (2) a temporal categorization of familiar actions, in which short, medium or long target durations had to be paired with one of three comparison action durations.

Temporal performance was systematically impaired in participants with mild ID. Moreover, the temporal impairment increased with age in the bisection task but not in the categorization task.

These findings suggest that the ability to estimate durations develops at a slower pace in individuals with mild ID compared to TD individuals.