18th May 2023

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.