Temporal clusters of age-related behavioral alterations captured in smartphone touchscreen interactions

Abstract

Cognitive and behavioral abilities alter across the adult life span. Smartphones engage various cognitive functions and the corresponding touchscreen interactions may help resolve if and how the behavior is systematically structured by aging. Here, in a sample spanning the adult lifespan (16 to 86 years, N = 598, accumulating 355 million interactions) we analyzed a range of interaction intervals - from a few milliseconds to a minute. We used probability distributions to cluster the interactions according to their next inter-touch interval dynamics to discover systematic age-related changes at the distinct temporal clusters. There were age-related behavioral losses at the clusters occupying short intervals (~ 100 ms, R2 ~ 0.8) but gains at the long intervals (~ 4 s, R2 ~ 0.4). These correlates were independent of the years of experience on the phone or the choice of fingers used on the screen. We found further evidence for a compartmentalized influence of aging, as individuals simultaneously demonstrated both accelerated and decelerated aging at distant temporal clusters. In contrast to these strong correlations, cognitive tests probing sensorimotor, working memory, and executive processes revealed rather weak age-related decline. Contrary to the common notion of a simple behavioral decline with age based on conventional cognitive tests, we show that real-world behavior does not simply decline and the nature of aging systematically varies according to the underlying temporal dynamics. Of all the imaginable factors determining smartphone interactions in the real world, age-sensitive cognitive and behavioral processes can dominatingly dictate smartphone temporal dynamics.