Time Perception in Autistic Adults: Interval and Event Timing Judgments Do Not Differ From Nonautistics

Abstract

It has previously been proposed that autistic people have problems with timing which underlie the behavioral and cognitive differences in the condition. However, the nature of this postulated timing issue has not been well specified and the existing experimental literature has generated mixed findings. In the current study, we attempted a systematic investigation of timing processes in autistic adults using scalar expectancy theory as a theoretical framework. Autistic (n = 58) and nonautistic (n = 91) adults matched for age, sex, and full-scale IQ completed a battery of auditory and visual timing tasks measuring basic subsecond duration perception (temporal discrimination thresholds), clock processes (verbal estimation), clock and memory processes (temporal generalization), and event timing (temporal order judgments). Participants also completed suprasecond retrospective duration estimates where the participant was not warned in advanced that they would be required to make a timing judgment, and questionnaires measuring self-reported timing behaviors in daily life. The groups reported differences on questionnaires, but measures of timing performance were comparable overall. In an exploratory analysis, we performed principal components analysis to investigate the relationship between timing judgments and participants’ self-reported social-communicative, sensory, and motor traits. Measures of timing performance were not well correlated with these questionnaire scores. The current study, the largest conducted on time and autism to date, shows no clear evidence for reduced timing performance in autistic adults.