Research Recap with Skye: Time Perception in Children with ADHD

0:05All right. Welcome to Hacking Your ADHD. I'm your host, William Curb, and I have ADHD. On this podcast, I dig into the tools, tactics, and best practices to help you work with your ADHD brain. Today, I'm joined by Sky Watterson for our research recap series. In this series, we take a look at a single research paper and dive into what the paper says, how it was conducted, and try and find any practical takeaways. In this episode, we're going to be discussing a paper called "Time Perception in Children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder : Does Task Matter?

0:36A Meta-Analysis Study." And this study is looking at how children with ADHD process the passage of time across different senses and experimental conditions. It investigates the exact mechanic behind time blindness, confirming that our internal tracking systems don't just fail universally, but experience a predictable collapse the longer an interval drags out, specifically stretching past the five-second mark. And we're gonna get into all this because it is interesting how this works and how relevant it really is.

1:07And so yeah, let's Yeah, no, I'm excited to get into it. So they're looking at different aspects of time perception as part of this. before we even get into the meta-analysis study of it all, I wonder if we should just talk a little bit about the idea of different aspects. So they talked about time production, time reproduction, motor timing, but a lot of people don't even know that there is, one, this, differential sense of time. I think a lot of people know about time blindness at this point, but that this idea of time reproduction itself Yeah, 'cause we often just think of time as a singular thing, like this, this is what time is.

1:49But then how we're using that time is very different in these different conditions. so I don't have the conditions right up here written on my notes. Could you, do, do you think you could so I think the key conditions, so do you want the time perception, the different aspects of time perception? Because I just went through those yeah, Okay, so I think the key piece is that, when we're talking about time, we think about, okay, I learned to tell the time, and now I have a full grasp of time.

2:23we think of time as just, what time is it? But really, it's about a whole variety of things. So we could talk about, how long does it take to do something, or if something takes an amount of time and you don't necessarily know how many minutes it is, you're not, using a stopwatch on it, can you reproduce how long you think it took to do something accurately? And then there's more motor stuff around, if I, am tapping or doing something, can you, can you copy that and, and what that looks like as well.

2:57Those are the general ones. Are there any ones that I'm missing there? no, I think those are the good, those are the, what they were covering. Yeah, 'cause it's a lot of it being like how we-- That perception, what is… Because yeah, when you just think, "Oh yeah, time blindness is I don't perceive time," but what is that perception layer? Is it-- And that is a lot of like, "Oh, can I repro- how can I reproduce? Can I do it verbally? Can I do it just physically being like doing it?

3:25Can I just think through how long something took and then make it-- And is it, how accurate is that?" And so a lot of times people aren't aware that time is this whole executive functioning segment that when it's missing is affecting more just than that I'm late. it's not just affecting I'm late, it also could affect your task, doing tasks themselves because you might assume that when you think, "Oh, I, I assume that I, this task is gonna take, maybe it's gonna take 20 minutes,"

4:00and really it takes three hours, this is just a working memory problem or a failure to break down the task enough. And that is true, but it also might be more of a time reproduction error. So that, that can be a factor as well, and so v- I f- I find that really interesting. I personally f- have found researching this over the past few years that it's, it's a relatively underexplored area in terms of people's ability to understand it Yeah. And I think, going the other way, way too with people being able to look at how long a task is going to take and being like, "That should take me Угу the, their brain be- is assigning a- additional load to it because of the it's boring or they don't wanna do it, and so their brain is cognitively being like, "Yes, don't put your coat away.

4:55That takes too long." And you're like, "It takes two seconds," but throwing it on the sc- floor takes no seconds, so and I am so guilty of that. Yeah. Okay, so if we get into, what they actually did. So this is a meta-analysis. It was conducted using PRISMA, which is great, so it's, kind of gold standard for, for how it was done. and they looked at meta-analysis of databases, so PubMed, ScienceDirect, Springer, all the usual, for knowledge up to June 20- June 1st, 2019.

5:28They were particularly looking for, the keywords of obviously ADHD, but also time perception, timing, time deficit, time reproduction, time estimation, or time discrimination. So that's part of what we're talking about here. They're looking for different ways that, that we, assess time. And what they ended up finding was, it was 25 papers that m- met the criteria after they went through the whole process of, of gathering and then excluding things that weren't relevant Yeah.

6:02Well, and also to mention too, they also, excluded anything that had comorbidities that weren't ADHD. So w- this is a very tight, like this is about ADHD, not about ADHD and depression Yeah, Which is, which is good and, and actually, relevant because a lot of times they… It's, it's always a personal decision, I feel, with a paper, whether they include these things or how they diagnose people or any of that stuff, so it's worth mentioning Mm-hmm.

6:32Yeah, because, uh, well, especially with a number of the comorbidities, that is going to also h- add a different layer of that time perception different. 'cause they, depression, a lot of people have that, issues with telling how long they've been sitting doing nothing and that kind of stuff. things seem to go on forever and instantly happen, and it's Yeah. Yeah, no, that's a really, really good point. So in terms of what they found, they found a significant impairment in time estimation, time reproduction, discrimination, anticipation, and tapping in children with ADHD in at least one domain and one time interval.

7:06And this is really relevant and it's a meta-analysis, of course, speaks to what other papers have found, which is that we struggle with time pretty much globally. And there was another paper that we don't reference here, but I recently spoke about it, where they found that even if somebody was getting medication that was supporting other areas like dopamine and working memory, they still struggled with time. So this is a very big part of ADHD struggles Yeah.

7:41And it's something that really needs to be monitored because there's so many ways that we try to do it. I was just talking to someone yesterday about, we shared a commonality in that a lot of our time blindness is solved through anxiety, which is a very unhealthy coping mechanism, but also very effective for usually the one people, if I'm working with a client and I ask them how things are going, it's usually the one they're using. Yeah which is something to be… 'Cause, and it was, when you step away from it and you're like, "Oh, I'm not checking the clock all the time," that's actually helping my focus way more when I'm not dealing with the anxiety of ti- dealing with time blindness and I can engage in what I'm doing Yeah, and it's interesting.

8:31It kinda reminds me then of the conversation about, that I had recently with Jenna Free about this idea of the nervous system and, does that affect your ability to manage your ADHD? but it, but at the end of the day, one of the things we do know is that compared to neurotypicals, we do struggle with this more Yeah, absolutely. And that was one of the funny things for the, me reading through this paper was I was like, "Oh, this is really interesting," and also, "Yep."

9:00"Yeah, I, I, I know all of this. This is, this is how I've lived for my I know. Sometimes you listen, look at these papers, you're like, "Well, I'm glad you guys figured it out as well." Yeah. And it's, and it's one of those things I'm like, yes, we need this kind of research because then it is very important that we are able to build other research off of this. because you, you do need to have those bottom layers to be like, "Hey, yeah, if we're going to be really exploring timelines, we need to 100% have it confirmed as something that is happening and not just something that is colloquially exactly.

9:36And, and that is the whole point of research is to, is to sort of fundamentally, not prove, 'cause you can't prove it, but, indicate that this is likely to be true, outside of other hypotheses, when someone, other people have been talking about it for ages. And that's usually how it gets into the zeitgeist is when people have been talking about it for ages Yeah. And it's interesting with this study too, because they did go really into looking at the, qualitative, this is how long.

10:08So, at the top of the show I was mentioning that, five-second mark where, tasks longer than five seconds cause, the performance to drop significantly. And I don't know, I-- That was-- How do you feel about, looking Yeah. I think it's really one of those things where you're switching largely from the, the lab to the natural environment. And so, there's always a question of like, can the things that we discuss in the lab really, be, mm, like can we really make a good argument about that in the environment?

10:41A lot of the times when they're talking about this they're like, "Well, if it was a two to three second time estimation it was pretty accurate, but if it was a seven second time estimation it was…" Or a 12 second. And it's, at the end of the day we're talking about seconds. So it's hard to f- you know, and some of these are more, I know people do do different kinds of assessments but when you're doing those kinds of lab tests I would… We were talking about this off air before we, before we jumped on, but you just almost just have more seconds to fail with Yeah.

11:15Yeah, it's, funny 'cause I was just thinking about this the other day when I was playing a video game where, you'd use powers and then you'd have to wait a certain amount of seconds for things to re- restore. And like the things that g- like I could do every two to three seconds, like I'm like, "Okay, I know how long these could take." But then I had powers that like would re- come back after 90 seconds, and I'm like, "That's an eternity." And then I'd be like, "It's back all of a sudden.

11:38How did that happen?" That, that is such a good IRL example of that assessment. We should, they should do that test. yeah, because that would be great. I think, I think it makes sense. I think I, I often, the way I describe it with, CEOs that I'm working with is I will, say to them like, "Oh, so, your life is probably things that are due at the end of today, things that are due at the end of the week, and the rest of the things." And, and most of the time people feel like that.

12:07And so if we're talking about it IRL, people's experiences are usually I can do today time estimation, I can do this week time estimation, but if I… And then I usually as a way of testing it I say to them, "Do you, can you feel the difference between three months and six months?" And everyone usually is like, "Mm, no." I couldn't. three months, six months, it's just the future. And this is obviously not a, not a, a proper assessment of it, but it does seem to naturalistically match that idea that the longer the time, the more we struggle with it, which makes sense Yeah.

12:47yeah, 'cause those time horizons, they just feel so far out there, especially when it's you're dealing with the now, Yeah. Although I will also say because obviously we're talking about real life and so things get messy often it feels like when I'm working with CEOs, the anxiety is a part of it. They're like, "I have to do this today or something bad will happen. I have to get this done by the end of the week or something bad will happen." But everything else doesn't usually have a negative association with it that I have to deal with right now, so I don't really find it urgent.

13:21So the combination between is it urgent versus is it important versus, the timeliness and the urgency kinda get a bit locked in together there Yeah, 'cause it's a different of thinking about like what's important that I do today versus what's important that I do in general, often gets lost because it's so easy to focus so much on the urgency that you lose sight of doing things like exercise, which like, yeah, that's important in general, but anything I do today doesn't matter compared to what I do in the long Yeah, and that's the, the hard part to really work through is to say, okay, how do we, how do we feed things that need to be done today and have that time estimation of right now to you in a way that you can actually do?

14:14And, and that's a lot more complicated. But it has been helpful, I will say, knowing that we struggle with time estimation and, and time reproduction, and knowing that we struggle particularly with it when it's a longer time horizon, has had some practically useful results when I'm, when I'm working with people. So it is good Yeah, I think that's really our big picture takeaway, and that, time blindness isn't just like a sensory glitch or like a behavioral choice.

14:44It's this like structural piece of executive function that we just cannot do as well as neurotypical people do. And so we just need to keep that in mind that, like yeah, we need to be able to see clocks and to be able to externalize how we're monitoring time because our internal clock just doesn't work the same way. Hello everyone. If you have enjoyed listening to this episode, then you might like to listen to my podcast, the ADHD Skills Lab, where we go and deep dive into more of the research, and also we focus on ADHD support for business owners, whether you're aspiring or you have your own company.

15:29Um, and if you have your own company and you wish that you had somebody who would just build these systems for you so you could stop figuring out what to do all the time, well, that's what we do. We are mentor and operator together. So if you wanna learn a little bit more about that, you can find me at Unconventional Organization. Thanks for listening.