June 2020: News Round-Up

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:

Telephone interview recording booth at BBC studios in Media City, Salford.

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.