Martin Wiener
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martinwiener.bsky.social
Martin Wiener
@martinwiener.bsky.social

Cognitive Neuroscientist and Associate Professor of Psychology at George Mason University. Perception of Time, Memory, & Action. Exec Director @ http://timingforum.org

Martin Joel Wiener is an American academic and author. He is currently a research professor at Rice University.

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Excited and thrilled and humbled that our work is now out at Nature Human Behaviour linking Memorability with Time Perception! I hope you all find it of interest 🙂

Memorability shapes perceived time (and vice versa)

#academicsky #neuroskyence #psychscisky #science
Memorability shapes perceived time (and vice versa) - Nature Human Behaviour
In this Article, Ma et al. show, across a series of experiments, that time and memorability (the probability of recalling a visual stimulus) mutually influence one another, suggesting that time is a f...
www.nature.com

Cool! Will be very interested to hear your thoughts

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
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...
arxiv.org

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...

Incredible article
🧠🫀 🫁 💯

Time, space, memory and brain–body rhythms
György Buzsáki
(2025)

Physical time is measured using arbitrary units whereas experienced time is linked to a hierarchy of brain–body rhythms... these rhythms, may be the source of our subjective feeling of time. 👇💥

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Time, space, memory and brain–body rhythms - Nature Reviews Neuroscience
Understanding how the brain represents experienced time and how representations of space and time are integrated to form episodic memories has been a goal of much neuroscientific research. In this Per...
www.nature.com

Reposted by Martin Wiener

🧠🫀 🫁 💯

Time, space, memory and brain–body rhythms
György Buzsáki
(2025)

Physical time is measured using arbitrary units whereas experienced time is linked to a hierarchy of brain–body rhythms... these rhythms, may be the source of our subjective feeling of time. 👇💥

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Time, space, memory and brain–body rhythms - Nature Reviews Neuroscience
Understanding how the brain represents experienced time and how representations of space and time are integrated to form episodic memories has been a goal of much neuroscientific research. In this Per...
www.nature.com

Reposted by Martin Wiener

1/n We have discovered that bees can keep track of time duration!
Bees can discriminate long 🟡🟡 vs short🟡 flashes, a bit like the "dash" and "dot" of the Morse code.
Check our new paper royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/... and videoclip youtu.be/hsGxU65OMQk?... @preparedmindslab.bsky.social

Reposted by Martin Wiener

📣New paper alert!📣
Ever wonder how to model the temporal generalization task? Interested in cross-modal comparisons? Our paper (w/ the magnificent Nir Ofir!) is for you! @timingresforum.bsky.social this could make for a solid post-conference decompression read
link.springer.com/article/10.3...
A drift-diffusion model of temporal generalization outperforms existing models and captures modality differences and learning effects - Behavior Research Methods
Multiple systems in the brain track the passage of time and can adapt their activity to temporal requirements. While the neural implementation of timing varies widely between neural substrates and beh...
link.springer.com

It isn’t?
Please repost! I am looking for a PhD candidate in the area of Computational Cognitive Neuroscience to start in early 2026.

The position is funded as part of the Excellence Cluster "The Adaptive Mind" at @jlugiessen.bsky.social.

Please apply here until Nov 25:
www.uni-giessen.de/de/ueber-uns...

Very cool! Any chance to play around with this yet? (I see paper says code available upon publication tho...)

Reposted by Martin Wiener

Introducing CorText: a framework that fuses brain data directly into a large language model, allowing for interactive neural readout using natural language.

tl;dr: you can now chat with a brain scan 🧠💬

1/n

Whoa, huge congratulations!!

I took a class with Rescorla and recall these findings. Curious what your take (or the students) was on them. Evidence for a temporal prior for association?

POSTDOC Opening: I'm hiring a postdoc to work with me, @ayeletlandau.bsky.social, and Yuval Benjamini on a 4-year NSF funded project to understand timing and memorability in the visual system. fMRI, EEG, eye-tracking all included.

If interested, please DM or email me for more information!
Thanks to NSF and BSF, we've received a CRCNS grant!! 🎉

I'll be working with the amazing @ayeletlandau.bsky.social and Yuval Benjamini to explore and understand how our sense of time and image memorability are linked. ⌛🧠

We have 2(!) post-doc opportunities available - details coming soon!

UPDATE!! HIRING POSTED:

Tenure track assistant professor in Psychology at George Mason University, with a focus on cognitive computational neuroscience. Reviews begin October 21st and continue thereafter.

Email me for more questions/inquiries

listings.jobs.gmu.edu/jobs/tenure-...

All this was the great work of Giuliana Macedo, a killer student in my lab. Huge thanks as well to Brady Roberts, Wilma Bainbridge, and Mathias Sablé-Meyer for providing their stimuli!

Beyond all this, we found that shapes/symbols with more edges were also processed faster in recurrent models of vision, and were also predicted to be more memorable.

Altogether, we think this provides evidence that visual time is guided by information content.

Here, we found that the durations of images that required more steps to generate were both dilated AND more precise. In the image below the ones on the right were seen as longer than the ones on the right.

ALSO, the effect was moderated by how subjectively meaningful subjects found the stimuli

Notably, Exp1 affected only precision, whereas Exp2 affected only accuracy. What's the link? In our final experiment we used line drawings generated by an algorithm from @mathiassablemeyer.bsky.social according to the minimum number of steps to create them.

doi.org/10.1016/j.co...

So what's going on? Do angles matter? We turned to more complicated symbols, both artificial and real:

Here, we found that symbols that contained more edges were dilated. In the attached image, the symbols on the right all seemed to last longer than the ones on the left.

osf.io/preprints/ps...

To answer this, we turned to intermediate layers of vision. We started out with the popular "Bouba Kiki" set. We found that the durations of more angular shapes ("Kiki"-like) were perceived more precisely and faster, modified by how large people perceived them and how consistently they named them.

Last year, we published a paper showing that scene images that were more memorable were also dilated. We found a link to how "fast" these images were processed through recurrent deep learning models of vision.

But, we didn't know WHY they were processed faster

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

Ok, so our sense of time is malleable, right? All kinds of stimuli alter perceived duration: bigger things seem longer than smaller things, red things seem longer than blue things. Scenes, contrast, emotion, biomotion, etc.

We can split these into "high" and "low" levels of vision

Which do you think lasts longer, a spade or an hourglass symbol?

Excited to share a new preprint from my lab, with some interesting and surprising results. 🧵 follows

doi.org/10.31234/osf...

"This integration supports the conclusion that time may be the fundamental dimension along which the brain organizes its sensorium..."

Fantastic review by Pawan Sinha and colleagues (@lukasvogelsang.bsky.social @marinv.bsky.social)

doi.org/10.1146/annu...
The Temporal Scaffolding of Sensory Organization
How a developing nervous system discovers meaning in complex sensory inputs has typically been examined separately for each sensory modality. Even as studies have uncovered modality-specific strategie...
doi.org

I had to do this for our paper using LaMem. The solution was to find similar images using an open source set (e.g. Pexels) and have a disclaimer in the figure caption. We put the actual images in OSF for anyone who wanted them.

What does alpha frequency *do*? Is it a clock, or a sampler? What's the difference?

The relationship between Individual Alpha Frequency and Time Perception: testing the Internal Clock versus the Sampling Rate Hypothesis

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
The relationship between Individual Alpha Frequency and Time Perception: testing the Internal Clock versus the Sampling Rate Hypothesis
Perceiving the duration of events is a fundamental ability for everyday life. Traditional research has focused on the role of alpha oscillations as an…
www.sciencedirect.com

Why is there no Bluesky link on @elsevierconnect.bsky.social? I'm trying to share papers here!

Very exciting article by Farzaneh Najafi (not on Bsky?) on interval timing as an intrinsic property of visual cortex!

Intrinsic interval timing, not temporal prediction, underlies ramping dynamics in visual and parietal cortex, during passive behavior

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Intrinsic interval timing, not temporal prediction, underlies ramping dynamics in visual and parietal cortex, during passive behavior
Neural activity following regular sensory events can reflect either elapsed time since the previous event (temporal signaling) or temporal predictions and prediction errors about the next event (tempo...
www.biorxiv.org