Hello,
I hope your summer is going well, wherever you are. We have just given our publications and members pages a much needed update..where does the time go?...Perhaps someone should investigate. Anyway, as you will see we are continuing to publish data from our time and autism project and we still have more in the pipeline. In addition, our current Master's student is currently analysing some potentially exciting data that may provide some crucial insights into the filled-duration illusion: the illusion that filled durations are time, (such as a tone) as perceived as being longer than empty durations of time (such as a period of silence). This effect has been known about for well over a hundred years, but it was only in recent years that it was discovered that the effect is multiplicative, in other words the discrepancy between the estimation of the filled and empty periods increases as their duration increases. This is mathematically consistent with an increase in the rate of something and has lead people to conclude that the internal clock speed is faster for filled duration than empty ones.  Although why this should be remains a mystery, and there are other potential explanations and issues that I will leave to a future paper! If you are interested in this effect the key references on it are:

Wearden, J. H., Norton, R., Martin, S., & Montford-Bebb, O. (2007). Internal clock processes and the filled-duration illusion. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 33(3), 716–729.

Wearden, J. H., & Ogden, R. S. (2021). Filled-Duration Illusions. Timing & Time Perception, 10(2), 97-121.

The new academic year is looming in the distance, so the next order of business is to decide on the next set of undergraduate and postgraduate research projects.

Enjoy the rest of the summer.

Luke Jones

Yes, as usual our update starts with an apology for how long it's been since the last one!

On the publication front our paper on simultaneity judgments in people with autism has now been accepted for publication in the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, Many thanks to Daniel Poole for his hard work on both the design and data collection but also for the main bulk of the paper writing.

Speaking of Dan, he has just started a lectureship position at the University of Sheffield, so congratulations to him. We are extremely grateful for all the hard work he has done with our lab (and others), and especially for all his work as our postdoctoral researcher on our ESRC grant investigating time perception in autism. We will continue to work with Dan as we still have remaining data coming out of that grant work to write up and build on.

On a less positive note we were saddened to hear of the passing of Michel Treisman recently. Treisman was one of the original creators of internal clock theory, his model leading directly to the work of Gibbon, Church and Meck in developing Scalar Expectancy Theory. There was an obituary in the Guardian here. I (Luke) met him at a conference I attended just before starting my PhD (a million years ago in 1999!), when the depth of my ignorance was only matched by my naive enthusiasm for the subject area. He gave an excellent talk that was interesting, enthusiastic and most of all clear to a non-expert (me) member of the audience. He was also very humble about the legacy of his work.

We have a lot of work coming out of the lab, so the summer will be spent paper writing. We have some interesting findings from projects on retrospective timing, the modality effect, manipulations of stimulus intensity, the filled duration illusion and motor timing in autism. So I'd better stop writing this blog and get on with it! All the best, Luke Jones.
 

Time for a lab news update. Lots happening at the moment. Firstly we have another couple of papers at various stages of review from our work on timing in autism. The ESRC grant came to an end some time ago, but we are still working through the large data set. One of the studies involved participants completing simultaneity judgements of audiovisual speech stimuli at a range of stimulus onset asynchronies. As with our previous paper on interval and event timing we found no significant difference between the perfomance of our participants with autism and the control group.

This month we have welcomed a new member to our research team Ms Sadie Mayo. Sadie has just started on the MRes and will be working on the filled-duration illusion for her dissertation. Our current MRes student Ms Yuxi Fu has just finished her studies, her dissertation also explored the filled-duration and the effect of delay and order. This work will form the basis of a journal article at some point in the near future. Thank you for your hard work Yuxi and good luck in your future studies!

Lastly I (Luke Jones) have continued to give interviews to the media about the distortion of time during COVID-19 and the associated lockdowns. The latest was for Philidelphia Magazine and you can find it here.

Hi All,

Time for another news round up. There has been lot's happening from the lab recently. Firstly a couple of key publications of ours have come out. The first of these is a major output from our three year ESRC funded investigation into time perception in autism. You can find the paper here. In this paper we report the results from a wide range of psychophysical tasks that explored timing and time perception across a whole spectrum of abilities. In short we found no significant difference between the performance of adults with autism and our nonautisic participants. That is not to say that people with autism do not report problems ‘with time’, but these problems appear to be to do with higher order concepts of time, planning, and time management. We have captured some of these problems in our large survey of parents of children with autism which you can find here.
 
Our second recent publication is a paper on the work of the late great Warren Meck who sadly passed away in January 2020. In this paper we explore Meck’s early work on temporal reference memory (the long term memory store for duration) and track some of the later developments. This aspect of Warren’s work is often overlooked by modern time perception researchers so it gave us great pleasure to bring it to the fore again.

On a personal level I (Luke Jones) followed on from Meck’s work when researching for my own PhD which was on temporal reference memory, so at the time I read pretty much everything he had published. Years later I met him at several conferences and I found him to be incredibly passionate about the subject and very encouraging and interested in other people’s ideas. He was a very generous and friendly soul, we hung out together at a rather odd conference in Vienna one year, he was on before me and joked that he was the warm up act for me. He was also amused that I enjoyed looking around the Necropolis in Vienna, when I showed him some photos of some of the statues I had taken he exclaimed to the room “Look, Luke has thing for dead chicks!” He was a colossus in the field and is missed by all who worked with or met him.

Lastly we attended the EPS workshop organised by Dr Ruth Ogden at Liverpool John Moores University. The topic of the workshop was 'Understanding real-world distortions to time: Who, What, Why and When? This was a small group focussed workshop and there were a range of fascinating presentations  by Ruth, Dr Joanna Witowska, Prof Chris Hoerl and Prof Teresa McCormack, Prof Marc Wittmann, myself (Dr Luke Jones), Dr Daniel Poole, Prof Sylvie Droit-Volet, and finally Prof John Wearden. It was an excellent meeting and we are working on a joint publication on the topic of passage of time judgements. Many thanks to Ruth for organising it.
 
 

Hi All, and a belated Happy New Year!

Graduating Time Lab Members

It has been too many months since our last update, like most labs and academics we have been flying by the seat of our pants for the last two years. Through all of the difficulties one of the saddest has been the lack of opportunity to celebrate the success of our students, as all our graduations have been cancelled. On that front I would like to start our news round up by extending our congratulations to Dr Martin Casassus who submitted his thesis and successfully passed his PhD viva exam last year. Martin's work was examining time perception in people with autism. We would like to thank Dr Catherine Jones (University of Cardiff) and Dr Jason Taylor (University of Manchester) for serving as Martin's external and internal examiners. The viva was conducted on zoom, and sadly there was no opportunity for celebratory drinks afterwards. although Martin and I (Luke) did manage to stay within the Covid rules at the time and have a few beers in the rain in my garden!

Martin is now working as a lecturer and researcher at the Universidad Autónoma in Chile. We will miss Martin, but are still working together publishing the remaining work from his thesis and we hope to work on new projects together in the future.

In other news we would also like to congratulate Ms Georgia Dunning who completed her masters' project in our lab. Georgia graduated with a distinction and top of her class. She has recently published her first paper on her experience during her placement in the neuropsychology department at Salford Royal Hospital. You can read her paper here.

New Time Lab Publications

On the paper front, publications from our 3-year ESRC funded project on timing in autism are now starting to come out. The following are available or in press and we have more in the pipeline:

Poole, D., Gowen, E., Poliakoff, E., & Jones, L. A. (2021). ‘No idea of time’: Parents report differences in autistic children’s behaviour relating to time in a mixed-methods study. Autism, 13623613211010014.

Poole, D., Casassus, M., Gowen, E., Poliakoff, E., & Jones, L. A. (in press). Time perception in autistic adults: Duration and relative timing judgements do not differ from non-autistics. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

Media Work

Dr Luke Jones was interviewed for USA today and the Courier Journal about how the perception of time has been altered by Covid-19 and the associated lockdowns and social restrictions. You can read the article here.

That's it for now, hopefully we will get back to more regular updates this year. Take care everyone.

Hi All,

We are very excited for our upcoming webinar about time and autism, which will include reporting some of the results from our 3 year ESRC funded investigation of the subject. You can find all the details on this page of our website. Anyone is welcome to come and join us. The whole event will be broadcast on youtube live here. We are particularly interested in your questions, comments and experiences, and what questions about time we might be missing.

Hope to see you there!
Luke Jones

Hello to all our readers, just a quick post to update on what has been happening since our last update in January.  Obviously a lot of time has been taken up with lecture recording and moving testing to online. In fact the online testing although not suitable for every experiment is proving to be a very efficient and powerful way of collecting data, and so far the data seems to be just as orderly...or disorderly!

On the paper front the first of several that we have 'in press' has been published. We have an article in Timing and Time Perception on the the judgements of auditory and visual stimuli. In this paper we review the overall state of play of studies in this area, and draw some conclusions about which of the widely reported effects seem to be consistent and which do not. (Wearden, J. H., & Jones, L. A. (2021). Judgements of the Duration of Auditory and Visual Stimuli. Timing & Time Perception, 9(2), 199-224.)

I (Luke Jones) gave an interview to the BBC on time in lockdown which was broadcast as part of the 'Unusual Times' podcast. You can listen to the episode here.

Lastly our lab's 3rd year students have conducted a facinating experiment comparing the timing of visual and auditory stimuli in both retrospective and prospective timing conditions. This is a highly novel experiment and the data are looking interesting so watch this space!

That's all for now, hope you are all keeping safe.

Happy New Year!

Welcome to what seems like the longest January in history. Indeed I (Luke) have given several media interviews discussing the distortion of time during lockdown. You can read my interview with Vice magazine here.

It has been six months since our last update. In that time we have been working 100% from home and currently still are. Despite the vaccination roll out we don't anticipate being back on campus until at the least the summer. Along with most reseach labs we have had to move our testing online, and combined with recording all our lecture content it has been a demanding time. You can find the videos for our 3rd year course on time perception on our new youtube channel here.

On the pubications front we have one new paper out on the judgement of auditory and visual stimuli and how they differ (and how they maybe more similiar in someways than has been supposed).  The paper is open access and can be found here. We have several other exciting papers under review or revision which we will hopefully be able to report on soon.

In October we were pleased to welcome a new member to our lab. Georgia Dunning has joined us as a master student and is going to be examining motor timing in people with autism. You can find details about Georgia's background here.

Lastly we were sad to say goodbye to our visiting intern Joanna Witowska. Joanna joined us last March on a six month funded internship. Through pure bad luck she arrived two weeks before the first national lockdown. The intended project working on time in virtual reality had to be cancelled. Instead Joanna has been involved in some work looking at the relationship between time and music (part of our ongoing collaboration with the Royal Northern College of Music). I'm pleased to report that Joanna recently passed her PhD defence upon her return to Poland. Congratualtions DR Joanna Witowska!

Till our next update I hope you are all staying safe and looking after each other.

Hi All,

Firstly I hope that all the students, staff and visitors to our website are healthy and well. Obviously people have and/or are going through difficult times with Covid virus, lockdown and all the assocaited chaos, disruption and stress.

Our lab (and the University) were closed down very rapidly a week before the UK lockdown, so for the last three months we have been unable to collect any data. The Lab and the majority of University buildings will be remaining closed until the autmn at the very earliest and probably into the new year. Luckily our 3rd year projects students had just finished collecting their data, and the large data set for our study on timing in autism has also just finished, so we have plenty of data to be getting on with. Here are a few things that have happened either just before the lockdown or since.

In late January we were very saddened to hear the news that Prof Warren Meck had passed away. Warren was one of the original architects of Scalar Expectancy Theory which was the birth of modern internal clock theory. I (Luke) had the pleasure of meeting and hangining out with him a couple of times, and when more time has passed I will post a blog about him and his work. My PhD was based on his work on Temporal Reference Memory, so his passing is an emotional hit on several levels. Our thoughts go out to his wife, family and all the academics who had the pleasure to work with him. He was a warm and generous man with boundless passion for the subject. He is and will be missed.

On Sunday 23rd February Dr Luke Jones was interviewed live on the Naked Scientists Podcast, broadcast on BBC Radio 5 Live and BBC Radio Cambridge. Luke answered questions about how the human experience of time passing changes as we age in different social situations. You can hear the whole program again here:

During lockdown we have had two journal papers accepted for publication. The first is an investigation into the effect of repetitive stimulation (click-trains) on temporal order judgements. This project was lead by our postdoctoral reseacher Dr Dan Poole, and involved the work of one of our 3rd year project students Kyle Lees. So special congratulations to Kyle on his first published paper. The paper is open access and can be downloaded here.

The second journal paper is a collaboration between our lab and the Royal Northern College of Music (RNCM).  This was a study of the factors that determine the perception of segmentation in music. Our lab is increasingly involved with the fusion of time and music psychology research, and we have other works in the pipeline with RNCM. Again the paper is open access and can be downloaded here.

Lastly and by no means least our PhD student Martin Cassasus passed his viva-voca examination this week. Huge congratulations to him, and a big thanks to his examiners Dr Jason Taylor (internal) and Dr Catherine Jones (Cardiff University).

Stay safe and look after each other.

January 8-10 2020 saw the Experimental Psychology Society conference at University College London. The society meets three times a year at various locations, but the January meeting is always held in London. Martin Casassus our PhD student presented an oral paper on his work on timing in autism covering both low level perceptual timing and higher order timing processes. Giving an EPS talk has become a right of passage for any experimental psychologist and Martin gave an excellent talk. You can find the abstract for the talk here.