Event Date
MARTIN WIENER, PHD
Associate Professor of Psychology
George Mason University
This is an in person event. The registration link will be added soon.
Abstract
Time perception is an essential aspect of conscious behavior - one must have an accurate representation of elapsed time to plan, react, and coordinate. However, despite its importance, time is also highly malleable, as a large number of stimulus features, attentional, emotional, and bodily states can alter how we perceive it, with some things appearing to last longer than others. Yet, the mechanism for these effects and the reason they exist is not well understood. In this talk, using the visual system as a model, I will describe recent work from my lab detailing how complex image features, including shape, edges, clutter, scene size, meaning, and memorability all influence perceived duration. The latter effect (memorability) provides a link between perceived duration and memory, revealing that the perceived duration of a stimulus at the time of encoding positively impacts the likelihood of recalling it later. Using a recurrent convolutional neural network model of the ventral visual hierarchy, we have linked these effects to the rate or "speed" at which stimuli are processed. We further show how this finding can be used to guide experiments and customize stimuli for selectively altering both perceived duration and memory recall. Altogether, our findings suggest the brain uses time as a means of gathering and encoding information about stimuli in the environment.
Bio
Dr. Martin Wiener is an Associate Professor of Psychology at George Mason University. He holds a PhD in Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania and MS in Experimental/Theoretical Psychology from Villanova University. After completing postdoctoral fellowships in neuroimaging at the University of Pennsylvania and George Mason University, he served as an AAAS Science & Technology Fellow at the National Science Foundation, where he worked with program directors in the Computing, Information Science, & Engineering (CISE) and Social, Behavioral, and Economics (SBE) directorates on projects related to computational and cognitive neuroscience, as well as on the topics of data sharing and big data and analytics. He returned to George Mason University as faculty in 2016, where he directs the Spatial, Temporal & Action Representation (STAR) lab. His work focuses on time perception and temporal processing, as well as rhythmic processing, motor control, memory and decision making and has been published in Nature Human Behaviour, eLife, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, and The Journal of Neuroscience and popularized in The Economist, The Guardian, Axios, and Scientific American. His lab uses neuroimaging (fMRI, EEG), noninvasive brain stimulation (TMS, tES) and computational modeling, as well as combinations between them. Dr. Wiener also is the executive director of the Timing Research Forum (www.timingforum.org), an international consortium of scientists interested in and devoted to the study of time.