Circuits and dynamics of temporal control

Lab Description

The perception of time is unique in many ways. For instance, we have no dedicated sensory apparatus to measure time and must resort to experiencing time through other senses. While there may be some occasions where we may doubt what we saw or heard, few other stimuli inspire the vast disparities in perception that ensue from our warped perception of time. Time flies on some occasions and stands still on others and if you stepped into a laboratory and submitted to a timing experiment, you would find your timing responses to be highly variable and biased towards previous observations. Despite all the variability and biases observed from measuring time responses, previous work has demonstrated that human and animal time estimates under uncertainty are statistically optimal. We exploit techniques at the intersection of mathematics, neurobiology, machine learning, and behavior to study the neural basis of temporal control in humans and rodents.