August 18th, 2023

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