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Martin Wiener

@martinwiener.bsky.social

680 followers 590 following 150 posts

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

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

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Martin Wiener @martinwiener.bsky.social · Apr 22

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

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Martin Wiener @martinwiener.bsky.social · 3h

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?

Martin Wiener @martinwiener.bsky.social · 1d

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!

Martin Wiener @martinwiener.bsky.social · Aug 26

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!

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Martin Wiener @martinwiener.bsky.social · 2d

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-...

Martin Wiener @martinwiener.bsky.social · 3d

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!

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Martin Wiener @martinwiener.bsky.social · 3d

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.

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Martin Wiener @martinwiener.bsky.social · 3d

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

Martin Wiener @martinwiener.bsky.social · 3d

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...

Martin Wiener @martinwiener.bsky.social · 3d

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...

Martin Wiener @martinwiener.bsky.social · 3d

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.

Martin Wiener @martinwiener.bsky.social · 3d

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...

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Martin Wiener @martinwiener.bsky.social · 3d

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

Martin Wiener @martinwiener.bsky.social · 3d

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...

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Martin Wiener @martinwiener.bsky.social · 7d

"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

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Martin Wiener @martinwiener.bsky.social · 8d

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.

Martin Wiener @martinwiener.bsky.social · 10d

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

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Martin Wiener @martinwiener.bsky.social · 10d

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

Martin Wiener @martinwiener.bsky.social · 11d

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

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Martin Wiener @martinwiener.bsky.social · 18d

As a grad student, I saw a neuroscientist give a talk about prefrontal neurons doing this or that (cognitive operations). At the end, an emeritus prof in the back asked “at what point can we say a neuron “does” something?”. There was no answer then, and I’m still hunting for it

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Martin Wiener @martinwiener.bsky.social · 21d

There's implications/predictions for this, such that the insula should be more active for "empty" than "filled" intervals, and that disruption/enhancement of insula should specifically affect these types. Further implications for ADHD and Schizophrenia

Martin Wiener @martinwiener.bsky.social · 21d

Well, ok, sure!

Bit hard to summarize it in Bsky (Maybe we can discuss at TRF4, Marc?)

General idea is the insula serves as a kind of "backup" timing system. Sensorimotor stimuli dominate, but in their absence (or unreliability) the insula provides an interoceptive signal

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Martin Wiener @martinwiener.bsky.social · 21d

Indeed! Craig's interoceptive model of timing is a great one, especially as we see so much evidence pointing to the insula and timing.

I have my own theory of what the insula is doing for time. Maybe one day I'll get to test it 😇

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Martin Wiener @martinwiener.bsky.social · 22d

Giving credit to @wanjawolff.bsky.social

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Martin Wiener @martinwiener.bsky.social · 22d

I found this paper very boring*

Effort and Boredom Shape our Experience of Time

*No I didn't. And, surprise! They propose the insula as a link between boredom and perceived duration

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

EFFORT AND BOREDOM SHAPE OUR EXPERIENCE OF TIME

Situations change over time, and so does our experience of them. For example, a task may initially feel engaging but can, over time, become monotonous…

www.sciencedirect.com

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Reposted by Raúl Pacheco-Vega, Jill A. Jacobson

Martin Wiener @martinwiener.bsky.social · 23d

WE ARE HIRING!!

Official posting coming soon for a tenure track assistant professor job in Psychology at George Mason University. Focus on Computational Cognitive Neuroscience and AI.

I’m chairing the search committee, so DMs and emails welcome.

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Martin Wiener @martinwiener.bsky.social · 27d

It could be? Historically, it's simply been the difference between a constant stimulus (e.g. 1s tone) or two discrete stimuli for demarcating a time interval (e.g. 2 tone pips separated by 1s). Both indicate the same interval (1s) but the former seems longer.

Martin Wiener @martinwiener.bsky.social · 28d

Also see:

link.springer.com/article/10.3...

Time perception and the filled-duration illusion - Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics

A reproduction design is used to show that temporal intervals containing brief tones appear longer than empty intervals of the same duration, the effect being independent of duration. These and previo...

link.springer.com

Martin Wiener @martinwiener.bsky.social · 28d

Very cool findings, but just curious, isn't this a case of the Filled duration illusion? The general finding that "filled" intervals are longer than "empty" ones?

brill.com/view/journal...

brill.com

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Martin Wiener @martinwiener.bsky.social · 28d

This is so 🐦 incredibly ⌛ cool 🧠

Millie Johnston @milliejohnston.bsky.social · 29d

I'm delighted to share that, together with @crowbrain.bsky.social our paper on time estimation in crows is now published in @natcomms.nature.com

We found that crows not only keep track of time, but individual neurons prefer different time durations 🐦⏱️🧠

Check it out:
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A neuronal correlate for time interval estimation in the crow’s telencephalon - Nature Communications

It is unknown how birds estimate time using brains organized differently from mammals. Here, the authors show that neurons in the crow NCL encode duration categories, supporting abstract, cue-independ...

www.nature.com

Reposted by Martin Wiener, Elisa Freschi

Millie Johnston @milliejohnston.bsky.social · 29d

A neuronal correlate for time interval estimation in the crow’s telencephalon - Nature Communications

www.nature.com

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Martin Wiener @martinwiener.bsky.social · 29d

Very excited to have @brynnsherman.bsky.social join us for the next @timingresforum.bsky.social Virtual Journal Club! Please join us for what should be a very interesting talk on her recent work! Sign-up details below:

mailchi.mp/28692b147cb0...

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