The neurological and cognitive components involved in the perception of time and how that knowledge is used by humans to guide behavior.

It is all a matter of time. I am interested in how we define time, physically, psychologically, culturally, and historically and how these cross-disciplinary definitions relate to each other. I am interested in the dichotomy of time seeming constant and consistent, as the ticks of a clock suggest, and yet also intangibly malleable as time flies when we are having fun and drags when we are bored.

My present research builds on theoretical and experimental work understanding the memory processes involved in learning and recalling very short durations of time. Some memory processes utilized by other domains (such as verbal or spatial learning) are shared in processing short durations, but there are also processes specific to temporal information. Since all cognition is occurs in time, understanding how time is processed may provide novel information for all cognitive domains, especially focusing on short time scales and working memory.

To assess these kinds of questions I utilize neurological methodologies such as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), I work with psychiatric populations known to have neurological alterations such as Schizophrenia, and I have a variety behavioral studies that demonstrate how emotions and delays affect memory representations of durations.