The development of space-time interactions: a paradoxical effect of age modulated by sensory context and task...

This study aimed to investigate the impact of spatial perception on time perception, and vice versa, in both auditory and visual modalities, as well as the influence of task difficulty in the visual modality. The experiment was conducted with children aged 5-6 years, 7-8 years, and adults. Participants completed four tasks over two days: one temporal bisection task and one spatial bisection task in each modality. In the visual modality, stimuli consisted of dots appearing on a screen, whereas in the auditory modality, spatially distributed sounds were presented. In both cases, participants were asked to indicate whether the duration or the distance was "short" or "long". Data analyses included ANOVAs, calculations of Weber Ratios (WR) and Bisection Points (BP). Results revealed significant cross-dimensional interference: space influenced time perception more strongly in the visual modality (kappa effect), while time further influenced space in the auditory modality (tau effect). These interference effects were more pronounced in older participants and modulated by task difficulty, with greater difficulty associated with reduced space-on-time interference (visual modality only). Children exhibited reduced interference despite noisier temporal representations, and the younger ones showed more symmetrical relationships, whereas adults displayed asymmetrical, modality-specific patterns. Overall, the findings highlight a strong developmental component in spatiotemporal interactions and support an Attentional-Bayesian framework that reconciles competing theories (ATOM and Conceptual Metaphor Theory) by positing a single flexible system where default Bayesian integration of magnitudes is dynamically modulated.