Time perception in autistic adults

Authors: Daniel Poole, Luke Jones, Emma Gowen and Ellen Poliakoff

What was the study?

Many autistic people describe experiencing problems relating to time. For instance, judging how long has passed since something happened. Researchers have suggested that this relates to a disrupted perception of duration (the sense of how long things last). However, evidence supporting this is inconsistent. To assess autistic peoples’ perception of time we asked participants to complete a variety of tests and questionnaires.

What did we do?

58 autistic and 91 non-autistic adults aged 18 - 45 took part. Participants completed tasks involving time perception judgements, such as comparing the duration of two tones. Participants also completed questionnaires asking about their experiences of time in everyday life.

What did we find out and what does it mean?

Firstly, performance was similar between groups on the experimental tasks suggesting that autistic people perceive time similarly to non-autistic people. This study worked with an adult sample and it would be useful to use a similar approach with autistic children. Second, the questionnaires suggest that there are differences in how autistic people manage and structure their time in daily life. New approaches to understanding time perception would be valuable in further characterising any differences and targeting support where required.

Applying open research practices

Our ESRC-funded project conceptually replicates a few previous studies, but with a larger sample and a broader range of time perception tasks. The study was pre-registered on Psyarxiv, has open material, open code and open data which are on OSF. 

We consulted with the Autism@Manchester expert by experience group when designing the study and setting up the testing session. We presented and discussed our findings prior to publication at an online workshop for autistic people and their families, practitioners and researchers (available here).

Overcoming challenges

We needed to invest more time at the beginning of the project to develop methods and analysis for the pre-registration. Because we had many different measures there were numerous decisions to be made (e.g. what to do with outliers or non-normal data). However, when analysing the data and writing methods, time was then saved.

We had to deviate from our pre-registered sample size because lock-down meant that we had to halt recruitment early. We were able to run other planned time perception studies online to circumvent this.

Benefits of using these open research practices

Pre-registering our hypotheses and analysis plan made it much easier to write and publish the findings of no difference between autistic and non-autistic adults in time perception tasks and to challenge some pre-conceptions in the literature.

Consultation with autistic advisors when we set up the project and testing session helped to make the sessions as comfortable and accessible as possible for autistic participants. This helped us with recruitment and with the quality of the data collected.

Top tip

Pre-registering a study with multiple measures is a useful to improve the design and analysis pipe-line, as well as increasing the confidence of future reviewers and readers in your work.

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