About me
I'm a lecturer and researcher based jointly in the Department of Informatics and School of Psychology at the University of Sussex, UK. My research focuses on human perception, particularly perception and experience of time.
I was part of the six-partner EU project Timestorm, which aimed to equip artificial systems with human-like temporal cognition.
More generally, I am interested in how usually coherent perception can result from varying and sometimes incoherent sensory input. My research focuses on human temporal perception. I am also interested in the interaction of temporal perception with conscious experience through phenomenal causality, the sense of agency, and temporal prediction. To investigate these topics, I use a combination of human behavioural, computational modelling, neuroimaging, and artificial systems approaches.
I completed my PhD under the supervision of Dr. Derek Arnold in the Perception Lab at the School of Psychology, The University of Queensland, Australia.
Subsequently, I held a Postdoctoral Researcher position at NTT Communication Science Laboratories in Japan, with Dr. Shin'ya Nishida.
In my early academic life I also spent time in the Synaptic Plasticity Lab at the Queensland Brain Institute.
News
Haven't updated this in a while, but the below three pre-prints were all published last year: Trial-by-trial predictions of subjective time from human brain activity in PLOS Computational Biology; A predictive processing model of episodic memory and time perception in Neural Computation; and Serious problems with interpreting rubber hand illusion experiments in Collabra: Psychology. The review experiences for these papers at the final locations were fair - the reviewers read the papers and made suggestions to improve them. Prior to those submissions, for all three of these papers, repeated submissions were a prolonged joke of people with competing interests rejecting for reasons unrelated to the content (often it seemed they didn't even read the papers). "Peer review" as it exists has become a complete joke - it's another corrupt enterprise run for the advantage of those who already have the sufficient privilege to abuse it. If people can "anonymously" reject things which aren't by their close friends or that they clearly haven't read, without consequence, then all of science "published" will only be about who you know, not about any form of reality (of course, we already see this with e.g. the reviewer/editor rings in the rubber hand "illusion" and the heartbeat interoception corners of the field where "published" work is completely removed from reality). Moving forward, I will only be submitting my own papers and reviewing at locations where reviews are conducted transparently in the hope that removing the anonymity of reviewers encourages them to consider whether they want to continue this kind of misconduct in public view. I will be encouraging all of my coauthors and colleagues to do the same.
New pre-print, not about time perception for a change. Serious problems with interpreting rubber hand illusion experiments. Title says it all, really. Rubber hand illusion is so strongly confounded by suggestion effects as to not really be worth much at all. Can't use RHI experiments (or similar) as basis of claims about body ownership.
Another time pre-print! Several years and almost 13,000 participants later, A predictive processing model of episodic memory and time perception is out (I can now stop promising how soon it's coming...). Lots of interesting stuff in it but, in short, the model reproduces the effects of attention, cognitive load, scene content on human estimates of natural scene duration up to ~ 1 minute - when judgements are made prospectively or retrospectively, with the same mechanism for constructing duration based either in memory formation or recall processes, respectively.
New pre-print Accumulation of salient events in sensory cortex activity predicts subjective time where we show that tracking dynamics in visual cortex (using fMRI) allows us to predict subjective biases in time perception about dynamic, naturalistic (though silent) videos. Control models that track dynamics in auditory or somatosensory cortex do not reproduce human biases.
Paper Perceptual Content, Not Physiological Signals, Determines Perceived Duration When Viewing Dynamic, Natural Scenes out in Collabra: Psychology.
Paper Intentional binding as Bayesian cue combination: testing predictions with trait individual differences accepted at Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance.
Paper 'Intentional binding' without intentional action out in Psychological Science. 'Intentional binding' size temporal binding can be found without any action. Therefore, it can never be taken as given that 'intentional binding' indicates the influence of intentions.
Work together with Hsin-Ni Ho at NTT CS Labs is now out in IEEE Transactions on Haptics.
After a long and painful peer-review process that changed nothing, our paper Activity in perceptual classification networks as a basis for human subjective time perception is now out in Nature Communications.
Paper on how serial dependence in relative timing (often called rapid temporal recalibration) is not like classic temporal recalibration (adaptation) now out at Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance. Pre-print here.
New pre-print examining the contributions of physiological and putative dopaminergic influences on duration perception relative to biases driven by perceptual content. Spoiler - only changes in perceptual content affect duration estimation.
New pre-print out on how humans determine correspondences between expected duration and different sensory events - Multiple Duration Priors Within and Across the Senses.
Paper from our group on the Uniformity Illusion is out in iPerception.
Paper from our group on serial dependence in visual variance published at Journal of Vision