id_1009. DEVELOPMENT OF A TOOL FOR ASSESSING ANALOGUE-CLOCK READING SKILLS
Anna Rachowicz1, Magdalena Miśkowiec1, Antonia Franaszek-Traczewska2, Marek A. Pedziwiatr1
1 Jagiellonian University, Centre for Brain Research, ul. Kopernika 50, 31-201 Kraków, Poland
2 Freie Universität Berlin, Neurocognitive and Experimental Psychology Lab, Habelschwerdter Allee 45 14195 Berlin, Germany
INTRODUCTION: The ability to read time from an analogue clock is acquired in childhood with the support of formal education and is considered so ubiquitous that analogue clocks feature prominently in public spaces, while the impaired ability to draw (and read) them is treated as an indicator of possible mental decline. The increased exposure to digital clocks that stems from the recent technological changes, such as the proliferation of smartphones, leads to the question of whether the assumption about the ubiquity of the ability to read time from an analogue clock in the general population still holds. Few studies have explored this topic, and currently, there is no standard testing instrument for assessing human performance in clock reading.
AIM(S): Our ongoing project aims to fill this gap and create such a tool. Along the way, we intend to leverage the inherent resemblance of clock reading to classic cognitive psychology tasks to answer basic questions about visual processing by, for example, analysing the patterns of errors in clock reading in relation to the characteristics of times shown on the clock faces (e.g. display of whole hours vs hours and minutes).
METHOD(S): Our first step involves a large-scale online experiment that assesses the difficulty of reading 144 different times separated by five-minute intervals. On each trial of this experiment, participants read the time from a numeral-free clock presented for two seconds and judge how difficult it was to read.
RESULTS: Initial results from 120 participants show higher accuracy for reading minutes, which, interestingly, does not reflect the order of development of clock reading skills in children, which is characterized by the earlier acquisition of knowledge about the clock’s hour hand.
CONCLUSIONS: Our data will contribute to the creation of a new tool for quantifying the ability to read time from an analogue clock and provide insights into the perceptual processes involved in this complex visual task.
FINANCIAL SUPPORT: This research was funded by a grant from the National Science Centre, Poland (2024/55/D/HS6/02157) awarded to the author M.P.