Martin Wiener

SensingTime2026 The Shaping a World-class University program of University of Padova and TRF collaborated in the organization of the 2nd TRF training school that took place during the 6th and 10th of July 2026 in Pad...

Sensing Time
Padova, Italy
6-10 July 2026

Ever wondered how humans experience the passage of time? Join the Summer School Sensing Time: How We Process Time Across Real and Extended Realities and immerse yourself in one of the mind’s most intriguing mysteries.

Registration deadline: 15 March 2026

Reminder, happening in 10 minutes!

NYAS Publications Click on the article title to read more.

Even more intriguing, there was work done back in the 80s to survey time across a huge variety of species, finding quite a variety (i.e. pigeons are very good at timing, but turtledoves - same family - are terrible at it). (nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...)

Fascinating! There's a rich history here of people wondering about timescales across species, going back to the work of van Baer in 1862 (ane.pl/index.php/an...). How do you think this connects?

You had me at Monster Manual

New virtual journal club coming up @timingresforum.bsky.social! Excited to have Ruth Ogden talking about how time matters in our everyday lives. 2/25, 10am EST. Sign-up link below:

mailchi.mp/f1952677a87c...

Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Cognitive/Computational Neuroscience If you are a current Barnard College employee, please use the internal career site to apply for this position. Job: Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Cognitive/Computational Neuroscience The Barnard Visua...

🚨Job alert! I'm recruiting a postdoc! If you want to study the time course of task-driven visual perception, please reach out! #neuroskyence #VisionScience #CogSci barnard.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Facult...

Interested in how different aspects of object information, including visual, semantics, and memorability, are encoded and represented in the brain? Check out our latest study in iEEG & fMRI~

Cool findings! It may also be that how subjectively long people felt they were looking at the image predicts perceived beauty

Modeling how contextual and structural biases shape duration perception Human time perception is flexible and shaped by both structural constraints and contextual influences. Disentangling these sources of bias is essential for understanding the predictive mechanisms unde...

Preprint out, from my work with @mamassian.bsky.social and Anne! We show that time perception is shaped not only by context but also by structural constraints, by extending classical Bayesian models by explicitly quantifying a structural prior impacting duration discrimination.
shorturl.at/q8bE6

Whoa! This is awesome! Thanks for making and sharing

Grad school me spent way too many hrs fighting matlab to generate dot arrays and extract parameters from pre-existing stimuli. So I built the thing I wish existed: an open-source, browser-based toolbox for generating AND analyzing dot arrays. No MATLAB, no installation, no inherited spaghetti code

Just curious: which part of your experience taking stims adds to the incredulity? (I get and share the neuroscience part, but am genuinely curious about the former)

Prediction errors bidirectionally bias time perception - Nature Neuroscience Toren et al. show that outcomes that are better or worse than expected lengthen or shorten the perceived duration of stimuli, respectively, and that this interaction between teaching signals and time ...

The irony/paradox is that dopamine also dilates (lengthens) perceived duration. And so motivation/guidance can't be just about minimizing experienced duration - the lengthening can be a cue for reinforcement

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Time Flies When You’re Having Approach-Motivated Fun - Philip A. Gable, Bryan D. Poole, 2012 Time flies when you’re having fun, but what is it about pleasant experiences that makes time seem to go by faster? In the experiments reported here, we tested t...

Why, yes! Time is completely subjective and contextual. Plenty of work linking motivation/outcomes/timing in the guidance of action (and perception! see: doi.org/10.1177/0956...). But also see: doi.org/10.1016/j.ne... and doi.org/10.1016/j.be... for some fantastic links).

The Neural Correlates of Time: A Meta-analysis of Neuroimaging Studies Abstract. During the last two decades, our inner sense of time has been repeatedly studied with the help of neuroimaging techniques. These investigations have suggested the specific involvement of dif...

Oh boy, happy to assist!

In terms of brain regions, there's been a good number of meta-analyses now on this (here's one direct.mit.edu/jocn/article...

But if you're curious about time and pathology, this 2012 review by Melissa Allman is an all-time classic:

academic.oup.com/brain/articl...

One interesting thing about this finding: People with ADHD commonly experience issues with time perception, which Ritalin is able to restore. Notably, the networks observed here are the same ones we see in timing studies (including insula!)

NYAS Publications Our experience of the world is inherently structured by temporal patterns. Yet a full understanding of how we process such patterns is still lacking. Across three finger-tapping experiments employing...

Our holiday celebrations are especially happy this year, with a new paper out: "Global and Local Deviance Effects in the Processing of Temporal Patterns", about how we detect and keep track of temporal regularities.

Congrats to @duniagiomo.bsky.social and the whole team!🎉

doi.org/10.1111/nyas...

Alpha power indexes working memory load for durations Biological sciences; Neuroscience; Cognitive neuroscience

Alpha power indexes working memory load for durations
www.cell.com/iscience/ful...
#neuroscience

Very exciting stuff. Although, maybe what we call the “attention” network isn’t necessarily doing only that (and the other networks may similarly contribute to attention in other ways).

But, as a parent of an ADHD kid, these results match a lot of what I see! Great work!

The Speed Limit of Visual Perception: Bidirectional influence of image memorability and processing speed on perceived duration and memory recall Visual stimuli are known to vary in their perceived duration, with some stimuli engendering so-called “time dilation” and others “time compression” effects. Previous theories have suggested these effe...

Very cool and looking forward to reading closely! You might be interested in our recent results on image memorability vs model entropy. We also see a detrimental effect at high levels. Would be curious to explore a connection.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Happening soon!

I'm sure we never engaged in that behavior in grad school 😉

Great work and congrats! Honest question: are there laterality effects here? I see IT was recorded bilaterally but HC on the left

Hey, listen! Very excited for the next @timingresforum.bsky.social virtual Journal Club!

Farzaneh Najafi will be giving a talk on her recent work on intrinsic timing and ramping dynamics in visual and parietal cortices. Registration link below!

Wed 12/10 @ 10am EST

mailchi.mp/864719714f87...

Memorability of visual stimuli and the role of processing efficiency Nature Reviews Psychology - Certain items are better remembered than others across individuals, a property known as memorability. In this Review, Bainbridge and colleagues detail memorability...

Memorability of visual stimuli and the role of processing efficiency

Very cool review on image memorability (hint: priority coding is key) by Wilma Bainbridge, @dirkbwalther.bsky.social @keisukefukuda.bsky.social, Lore Goetschalckx

rdcu.be/eSyjz

Cool! Will be very interested to hear your thoughts

Interval timing in deep reinforcement learning agents The measurement of time is central to intelligent behavior. We know that both animals and artificial agents can successfully use temporal dependencies to select actions. In artificial agents, little w...

Not specifically (although I just got a grant on the topic, so hopefully soon 🙂)

I did a post once on the other place noting that LLMs like ChatGPT have no sense of time (ask them)

There's also this paper, with some great insights: arxiv.org/abs/1905.13469

I once met a couple of Australians who were terrified at the idea of Ticks and Lyme Disease. I countered that Australia had spiders and they said “yeah but we can SEE them!”

Happening Wednesday! The next @timingresforum.bsky.social virtual journal club. Please join to hear and support two PhD students present their work (Luigi Micillo and Aybüke Durmaz), linking arousal, decision making, and timing. Registration link below:

mailchi.mp/bec6a9d9cf6a...