Performance of impulsive and non-impulsive subjects on two temporal differentiation tasks

Abstract

Recent theories of impulsiveness have suggested that impulsive individuals differ from non-impulsive subjects in their ability to estimate time. In the present study impulsive and non-impulsive individuals were compared on a temporal reproduction task in which they had to reproduce a standard time interval, and on a temporal discrimination task which required them to discriminate between temporal intervals. On the reproduction task impulsive subjects tended to under-reproduce the standard, whereas the non-impulsive subjects over-reproduced the standard. The results of the discrimination task indicated that impulsive and non-impulsive subjects also differed in their ‘discriminability indices’, although performance was found to be related to intellectual differences between the groups.