TRF Talks 2026 - Miria Plastira and Anna Wagelmans

Speaker: Miria Plastira, PhDc, Department of Psychology, University of Cyprus, Cyprus. Title: The Power of Expectations: The Effect of Verbal Speed Cues on Time Perception Abstract: This study investigated the effect of verbal cues, and the expectations they create, on perceived speed and duration using audiovisual stimuli across two experiments. In both experiments, participants viewed identical stimuli of two different durations, featuring a female avatar speaking in German. Participants were informed through instructions that the stimuli would be presented at different speeds, although in reality the speed remained constant. In Experiment 1, participants reproduced the duration of each stimulus and rated its speed on a scale from 1 to 9. The results showed that the speed-related instructions significantly influenced both perceived speed and reproduced durations: stimuli presented as “fast” were rated as faster and reproduced as shorter in duration, whereas those presented as “slow” were rated as slower and reproduced as longer in duration. Experiment 2 focused exclusively on the time reproduction task in order to investigate whether speed-related information retained in memory affected the reproduced durations in Experiment 1, given that participants there were first asked to reproduce the duration and then evaluate the speed. The results of Experiment 2 showed a trend consistent with that of Experiment 1, highlighting the role of expectations in shaping time perception. Speaker: Anna Wagelmans, PhDc, Université Paris-Saclay, NeuroSpin, France. Title: The cost of mental navigation in time: distance effects and shortcuts Abstract: Through mental time travel, humans can “self-project” in time and imagine themselves away from the present, in the past or in the future. One hypothesis is that this ability is enabled by the setting up of a mental timeline. Herein, we hypothesize that a mental timeline is a temporal cognitive map – by analogy to spatial cognitive maps. The temporal cognitive map provides the metric and direction necessary to compute temporal distances between mental events. In this framework, “self-projection” is operationalized as a shift of the temporal cognitive map to a new landmark. To test this hypothesis, we designed a mental time travel task (Experiment 1, N = 28; Experiment 2, N = 35) where participants self-projected at different distances in time, and judged whether previously learned events occurred before or after their mental location. We show a novel self-projection distance effect, where the behavioural cost increases parametrically with the distance of self-projection, suggesting that mental time travel elicits distance computations. We then tested whether such distance computations could be facilitated when integrating the structure of events, and showed that participants could flexibly build landmarks to infer novel paths in time, analogous to shortcuts in spatial navigation. We also find evidence for an asymmetry of past/future self-projection. Interestingly, this asymmetry does not result from a left-to-right spatialization of the mental timeline predicted by the Spatial-Temporal Association of Response Codes (STEARC). Rather, past/future asymmetry may be a distinctive feature of temporal cognitive maps. Altogether, our findings suggest that mental time travel relies on navigating a cognitive map of time. Bio: Anna Wagelmans is a cognitive neuroscientist interested in how humans build a sense of self in time. Her Ph.D. work focuses on mental time travel, the ability to imagine oneself in the past and in the future, and its operationalization in the framework of cognitive mapping. With a background in both Biology and Philosophy, she has a keen interest in theory and characterizing the cognitive representations and operations underlying highly phenomenological processes such as mental time travel, as well as their implementation, using psychophysics and neuroimageing (MEG).