Duration judgements
What processes allow people to estimate and discriminate intervals—and what changes those judgements?
About the lab
The science of subjective time
Why does a minute sometimes fly by—and sometimes seem to last forever? We study the mechanisms behind those experiences.
Our focus
Understanding the mind’s sense of time.
Research into time perception at The University of Manchester has a long history, extending back to the work of John Cohen in the 1960s and later researchers including Cliff Bell and John Wearden.
The Time Perception Lab examines how people perceive duration, judge the passage of time, coordinate timed actions and remember how long events lasted. Our work encompasses sub-second intervals, ageing, cross-modal timing, everyday temporal distortions and relationships between subjective time and information processing.
We primarily use psychophysical experiments and computational modelling, complemented by other behavioural and neuroscience methods. The lab is directed by Dr Luke Jones at The University of Manchester.
Research areas
Questions we investigate
Remembered time
How do memory, attention and event structure shape retrospective judgements of duration?
Multisensory timing
How do auditory, visual and tactile signals contribute to the subjective experience of duration?
Time in everyday life
How is timing related to music, cognition and individual differences in experience?