News & updates

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 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 & Time Perception on the judgements of auditory and visual stimuli. In this paper we review the overall state of play of studies in this area, and draw conclusions about which of the widely reported effects seem 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, broadcast as part of the 'Unusual Times' podcast. Lastly, our lab's third-year students conducted a fascinating experiment comparing the timing of visual and auditory stimuli in 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, including an interview with Vice magazine.

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 rollout we don't anticipate being back on campus until at least the summer. Along with most research 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 videos for our third-year time-perception course on our YouTube channel.

On the publications front we have a new, open-access paper on judgements of auditory and visual stimuli and how they differ (and may be more similar in some ways than has been supposed). We have several other papers under review or revision which we hope to report on soon.

In October we were pleased to welcome Georgia Dunning, who joined us as a master's student examining motor timing in people with autism. Lastly we were sad to say goodbye to visiting intern Joanna Witowska. Joanna joined us on a six-month funded internship in March, two weeks before the first national lockdown. Her planned work on time in virtual reality had to be cancelled; instead she contributed to research on time and music as part of our 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. Congratulations 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. People have been going through difficult times with coronavirus, lockdown and all the associated chaos, disruption and stress.

Our lab (and the University) closed very rapidly a week before the UK lockdown, so for three months we have been unable to collect data. The lab and most University buildings will remain closed until autumn at the earliest, and probably into the new year. Luckily our third-year project students had just finished collecting data, and collection of the large data set for our study on timing in autism had also finished, so we have plenty to analyse.

In late January we were saddened by the passing of Professor Warren Meck. Warren was one of the original architects of Scalar Expectancy Theory and modern internal-clock theory. I (Luke) had the pleasure of meeting and spending time with him. My PhD was based on his work on temporal reference memory, so his death is an emotional hit on several levels. Our thoughts go out to his wife, family, and everyone who knew him: he was warm and generous, with boundless passion for the subject.

On Sunday 23 February Dr Luke Jones was interviewed live on The Naked Scientists, broadcast on BBC Radio 5 Live and BBC Radio Cambridgeshire, answering questions on how the experience of time passing changes with age and in different social situations.

During lockdown we have had two journal papers accepted. The first, led by our postdoctoral researcher Dr Dan Poole and involving third-year student Kyle Lees, investigates repetitive auditory stimulation (click trains) and temporal order judgements. Congratulations to Kyle on his first publication. The second is a collaboration with the Royal Northern College of Music (RNCM) studying perception of segmentation in music. Both papers are open access and we have more time-and-music research underway.

Lastly, and by no means least, our PhD student Martin Casassus passed his viva voce examination this week. Huge congratulations to him and thanks to his examiners, Dr Jason Taylor and Dr Catherine Jones.

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 different locations; its January meeting is always held in London.

Martin Casassus, our PhD student, presented an oral paper on his research into timing in autism, covering both low-level perceptual timing and higher-order timing processes. Giving an EPS talk has become a rite of passage for any experimental psychologist, and Martin gave an excellent presentation. The abstract was available through the Experimental Psychology Society.

Dr Luke Jones was an invited member of a round-table panel at the 55th Annual Conference of the Royal Musical Association, held at the Royal Northern College of Music on 11–13 September 2019. The session theme was 'Music and Time: Psychology, Philosophy and Practice'.

The panel was chaired by Dr Michelle Phillips (RNCM). Other participants included Abigail Conner (Philosophy, University of Manchester), Dr Lauren Redhead (Goldsmiths), Dr Matthew Sergeant (Bath Spa University) and Dr Joel Smith (University of Manchester).

Panel members reflected on memory, duration, the present, the subjective and the objective before opening the discussion to questions from the audience. Members of the panel were working on a book, Music and Time: Psychology, Philosophy and Practice, for Boydell & Brewer.

The second semester of 2019 was a hectic one; here is a catch-up. In February our PhD student Emily Williams passed her viva voce and became Dr Emily Williams. Her graduation was in July, with her two supervisors Dr Luke Jones and Dr Andrew Stewart. It was a very proud day, tinged with sadness: Emily has been a major force in the lab and school over the five years from her undergraduate dissertation, through MRes, to funded PhD. We are still writing papers together, and she will always be part of our lab. Thank you for everything, Emily.

In April The University of Manchester hosted the spring Experimental Psychology Society meeting. Our lab was well represented. Emily gave her first EPS oral presentation on temporal difference thresholds and repetitive stimulation, as well as a poster on repetitive stimulation and physiological arousal.

The first paper from our three-year ESRC-funded timing-and-autism project has been published. It is a systematic review of time-perception studies in autism, undertaken with colleagues in autism research at Manchester and forming part of Martin Casassus's thesis. Although difficulties with 'time' are often reported by autistic people and their families, it is not yet clear which timing abilities are affected. Evidence for deficits in fundamental stimulus timing is unconvincing; evidence is somewhat stronger for complex timing tasks. Addressing these issues is central to our ESRC project, and we expect empirical papers over the coming year.

Over the summer we are writing papers and looking forward to the first batch of data from our preregistered large-scale study of timing performance in people with autism. We are aiming for strong open-science practice in these projects.

We end on sad news: Dr Don O'Boyle, formerly a lecturer here until 2003 and a researcher interested in timing (including in Parkinson's disease), died after a long illness. Don was a co-supervisor of my (Luke's) PhD and showed me great kindness and patience when I first arrived in Manchester. Rest in peace, Don; our thoughts are with his family and friends.

Emily Williams, our PhD student, passed her viva examination on 18 January. Her external examiner was Dr William Skylark (Cambridge) and her internal examiner was Dr Jason Taylor (Manchester), and we thank them for their time.

According to the examiners' report Emily performed brilliantly; they were so interested in her research that the viva lasted almost three hours (somewhat stressful for her supervisor, pacing outside – me, Luke Jones!). Emily will graduate in July. She has already started postdoctoral research in Leeds.

Thank you to everyone who helped and supported Emily during her PhD, and especially to Dr Andrew Stewart, her co-supervisor.

Hi everyone, Emily here, writing a guest blog post about recent developments. In the past few months I have submitted my PhD thesis, started a postdoc and had my first first-author paper published online!

My thesis, Investigating the Pacemaker Component of the Human Timing System, presents three original works testing the pacemaker explanation of timing associated with Scalar Timing Theory. I am looking forward to discussing this work in my viva in January, and hope to graduate in July 2019.

In September I began work as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Leeds on the Helping Handwriting Shine programme, a large randomised controlled trial of a handwriting intervention. My earlier outreach and widening participation work inspired my interest in raising the educational attainment of young learners. I was interested in this post because the intervention aims to free up the cognitive resources of pupils whose handwriting is slow and effortful.

Finally, the first paper from my PhD has been published in Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics: Modality Differences in Timing and the Filled-Duration Illusion: Testing the Pacemaker Rate Explanation.

I look forward to continuing to work with Time Lab Manchester as an external collaborator. — Emily A. Williams

Today was a mixture of celebration and sadness as our team member Hailey (Hui Wen Chong) graduated from her MSci Biology with a first-class mark. Hailey returns to Singapore tomorrow and starts a new job in September.

We thank Hailey for all her hard work over the past two years, and for being such a fun and professional member of the Time Lab. We wish her good luck and will miss her!

Emily will attend the International Multisensory Research Forum in Toronto, 14–17 June. She is presenting a poster, 'Examining Modality Differences in Timing to Test the Pacemaker Explanation', summarising our submitted paper Modality Differences in Timing and the Filled-Duration Illusion: Testing the Pacemaker Rate Explanation.

Emily's poster is in Poster Session 2 on 16 June, 3:15–4:45 pm, at Poster 2.84. Download the IMRF poster (PDF).

On Tuesday 10 April, members of the Time Lab attended the 'What's Time?' event at Google Digital Garage in Manchester. The event was organised by the Institute of Physics in conjunction with the Royal Northern College of Music (RNCM), Manchester Time Lab and Google.

The evening started with two musicians from RNCM, a pianist and a flautist, playing four very different pieces of music. The pianist used the Google Manchester Piano, which displays a different image of Manchester depending on which note is played. Audience members were asked which piece of music they thought lasted longest. Dr Michelle Phillips of RNCM then discussed time and music, including the properties of a piece of music and of the listener that influence perceived duration.

Dr Luke Jones gave a general introduction to time perception followed by questions and answers. Finally Dr Hannah Renshaw from the Institute of Physics gave a talk on the physics of time.

The event also included two public experiments: one investigated the perception of the duration of different types of music, the other people's mental imagery for time. We are grateful to PhD student Emily Williams for helping run the experiments on a very busy evening.

Many thanks to everyone who attended and to all the organisers and hosts at Google.

Our PhD students Emily Williams and Martin Casassus are travelling to the first Timing Research Forum conference in Strasbourg to present their research. Emily's poster, 'Modality Differences in Timing: Testing the Pacemaker Speed Explanation', will be presented on Tuesday, 4:45–6:15 pm. Martin's poster, 'Time Perception and Autistic Spectrum Condition: A Systematic Review', will be presented on Monday, 5:30–7:00 pm.

Download Emily's Timing Research Forum poster (PDF). Download the Strasbourg poster (PDF).

A warm welcome to Ms Hui Weng Chong (Hailey), who has joined our lab. Hui Wen is a final-year MSci Biology student at the University of Manchester, supervised by Dr Luke Jones.

Hui Wen has experience across several biological research disciplines. In 2015 she assisted Professor Wong's Pathology Lab at University Malaya Medical Centre with work including Alzheimer's disease and Japanese encephalitis. She later worked in Professor Takano's lab on the 'AlcoPatch' sweat alcohol biosensor as part of the 2016 International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition.

She has also published on genetic polymorphisms associated with schizophrenia using bioinformatics. Her current main interest is time perception and the effects of sensory modality on duration judgements in working memory.

Congratulations to our postgraduate lab member Jessica Henderson, who has been employed as a research assistant at Liverpool John Moores University.

The project examines sympathetic and parasympathetic activity and their effects on time perception. Specifically, it asks whether sympathetic activity induced by stress leads to overestimation on a timing task, and whether parasympathetic activity induced by mindfulness attenuates that effect. The research is funded by the Bial Foundation and led by Dr Ruth Ogden.

Jessica is currently completing an MRes in Psychology supervised by Dr Luke Jones.

Emily will be at CogSci next week, presenting her conference paper 'Modality Differences in Timing: Testing the Pacemaker Speed Explanation' as a poster.

You can find her during Poster Session 3 in the Monarch Suite on Saturday 29 July, 1:20–2:50 pm. Look for Poster 111! Download the digital poster (PDF).

We have very exciting and welcome news: our Time Perception Lab has been awarded a three-year ESRC grant to investigate timing processes and behaviour in autism. The project brings together expertise from our Time Perception Lab, the BEAM Lab and the Manchester Autism Research Group.

The project will investigate timing from fundamental perceptual time discrimination through to higher-order concepts of time and temporality. Our lab member Dr Dan Poole will be the postdoctoral researcher on the project.

Last night we attended the Sound and Music late event at the Museum of Science and Industry. The event was a great success, sold out with more than 450 people attending.

Dr Michelle Phillips (RNCM) and I (Dr Luke Jones) both gave a talk, alongside Peter Saville, founder of Factory Records. We ran two experiments. One examined how different kinds of music influence perceived duration: visitors listened to versions of a specially commissioned piece of music and estimated how long they lasted. The second explored people's mental imagery for time, asking them to draw their representation of a year, month, day and week.

We gave out cards promoting the lab and planned to share the results on the website. It was valuable to collect data from a wider population than undergraduate students, and a great opportunity to talk with the public about research at the Time Lab and the University of Manchester.

On Wednesday 15 March 2017 we are contributing to a public engagement evening at Manchester's Museum of Science and Industry (MOSI), including a talk by Factory Records founder Peter Saville and a silent disco.

Our lab director Dr Luke Jones and research collaborator Dr Michelle Phillips from the Royal Northern College of Music will give a talk and run two experiments. The first explores how properties of music affect perceived duration; the second explores mental imagery for days, weeks and months of the year.

We won't disclose too many details yet, but plan a full report on this blog after the event.

We now have a great new logo for the Time Lab, designed by our PhD student Emily Williams. We ordered business cards, a mug and a pen to test the design, and we're very pleased with how they turned out.

The hexagonal design is an homage to the bee, a symbol of Manchester and its industrial past; the colours come from the University of Manchester; and the clock hands explain themselves. Thanks, Emily!

A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all our followers from everyone at Manchester Time Lab! 2016 was a busy and successful year: we started a new collaboration with RNCM (Royal Northern College of Music), presented research at the EPS conference in Oxford, a Philosophy conference in Manchester and the Rock/Body meeting at the University of Exeter, and gained two new master's students and a PhD student in September.

The next event is an EPS workshop on time perception at the University of Liverpool next week. Just before the Christmas break we had our lab Christmas meal, which was lots of fun. Here's to an exciting and productive 2017!

Rock/Body is an AHRC-funded project bringing together researchers in the humanities, social sciences, health and earth sciences, alongside artists, to investigate human relationships with geology. Our lab director Dr Luke Jones was invited to the meeting dedicated to Time and Duration.

The aim was to explore how people grasp (or fail to grasp) geological and cosmological timescales, sometimes called 'deep time'. This matters for policy-making: understanding evidence about climate change, planning around finite raw materials and anticipating technological developments including AI. It also matters for science communication and for teaching about the origins of the universe, stars and planets, and the processes of evolution.

There were talks and performances from geologists, writers, dancers, anthropologists, artists, museum directors and a psychologist from our lab. My (Luke's) talk explained psychological time perception and how our models might – or might not – apply to thinking about deep time.

It was a pleasure to attend such a meeting. Encounters between science and the arts are particularly useful for sharing ideas and developing new questions and perspectives.

A workshop on time perception, funded by the Experimental Psychology Society, will be held at Liverpool John Moores University on 19 January 2017. Details about submitting an abstract and applying to attend were available through the organisers; attendance is free but registration is required.

The Time Lab will be represented, and the conference is being organised by our collaborator Dr Ruth Ogden.

Back to rainy Manchester after a sunny few days in Oxford. The joint meeting of the Experimental Psychology Society and the Spanish Experimental Psychology Society (SEPEX) was held at St Anne's College, with up to three sessions running in parallel. Our lab was represented by Dr Luke Jones and PhD student Emily Williams.

One particularly interesting talk was given by Gabriela E. López-Tolsa (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Spain) on adjunctive behaviour and the performance of rats in a temporal bisection task.

Emily's poster was very well received and generated considerable interest, including from Dr Peter Naish, co-author with Michel Treisman on some influential work on timing, and known for research on hypnosis. Many thanks to the organisers and to EPS for awarding Emily a Grindley Grant to attend.

This weekend our lab is represented at the Experimental Psychology Society conference at St Anne's College, University of Oxford.

Our PhD student Emily Williams will present a poster on her master's and PhD research into the pacemaker component of Scalar Expectancy Theory. It is Emily's first presentation at the EPS – a milestone in the career of an experimental psychologist.

On 13 June 2016 the Department of Philosophy at The University of Manchester convened a conference on the philosophy and psychology of time. Speakers included Dr Luke Jones from our lab. The talks were a fascinating and informative opportunity to compare philosophical and psychological approaches to human experience of time.

This reflects an exciting and growing tendency for philosophers of time and time-perception psychologists to work together. Many thanks to the Philosophy department for organising it.

The programme included Dr Luke Jones (Manchester), 'The Perception and Psychology of Time: An Overview'; Ms Abigail Connor (Manchester), 'Measuring Phenomenal Duration'; Professor Julian Kiverstein (Amsterdam), 'Is the Experience of Now a Neural Construct?'; Professor Barry Danton (Liverpool), 'Extensionalism: Variations and Challenges'; and Professor John Wearden (Keele), 'Some Philosophical Problems About Time Perception: How Psychology Might Help'.

This week saw the start of data collection for a new collaboration between our lab and researchers at the Royal Northern College of Music (RNCM).

The project investigates the effects of performance anxiety on heart rate, musical performance and timing. We would like to thank all the piano students who volunteered to take part.

On Thursday 19 May 2016 we hosted the North West timing meeting, bringing together researchers from Liverpool, Manchester and Keele. Thank you to everyone who came and made it a success. A productive series of discussions and presentations was followed by an excellent curry and pub session.

The meeting included members of our lab, Dr Ruth Ogden from Liverpool John Moores University, Professor John Wearden from Keele, Dr Michelle Phillips from the Royal Northern College of Music, and regional postdoctoral researchers and colleagues from Manchester's Philosophy department.

Some of our research interests overlap with those of the philosophers, and we have a joint meeting in the Philosophy department next month. More details to follow.

Emily recently featured on The University of Manchester's Young Persons University blog, explaining her research and time perception more generally.

The Young Persons University initiative was a widening-participation project for teachers and students in the community. It helped school pupils, college students, parents and teachers learn about studying different university subjects, the research being carried out and key ideas within various disciplines.

Welcome to the new website for the time perception laboratory at the University of Manchester. Here you can read the latest news about our activities, find out about current and previous lab members, check our publications, and find information about opportunities to take part in research studies.

For background information about the lab, see our About page.