The Psychologist August 2012

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psychologist vol 25 no 8

august 2012

About time A special feature on time and children, drugs, sleep and more

Incorporating Psychologist Appointments ÂŁ5 or free to members of The British Psychological Society

letters 558 news 568 careers 626 big picture centre

when psychologists become builders 600 a look through the PRISM 604 new voices: South Asian mental health 634 looking back: Walter Miles’ grand tour 638

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letters 558 tackling the environmental crisis; voluntary work; learning disability; and more

THE ISSUE

news and digest fraud or scientific mistake?; Queen’s Birthday Honours; consciousness conference; nuggets from the Society’s Research Digest; and more

Bertrand Russell once said: ’To realise the unimportance of time is the gate to wisdom.’ Several authors in this issue would beg to differ.

According to Dan Zakay, in the first contribution to our special feature (see p.578), ‘…time shapes human life and behaviour. Physical events proceed according to objective time and biological cycles are controlled by internal pacemakers, but psychological time – how humans experience it – differs in various important ways.’ This month we explore time and drugs, children, sleep and much more. For extra time, see our online-only articles at www.thepsychologist.org.uk.

John Wearden, who was instrumental in gathering these contributions, says succinctly ‘time is all you’ve got’ (see p.582). Not in this issue it isn’t: there’s loads more, including (on p.600) my own piece on psychology and Lego, with a ‘love letter to Lego’ from Uta Frith (now a ‘DBE’ – congratulations to her!).

Can you find an hour or two to spend with The Psychologist this summer? If you’re feeling pressed, remember it’s all in the mind. As Douglas Adams said, ‘Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.’

Dr Jon Sutton

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media 576 sex and zombie cannibals, with Mark Sergeant; science journalism; and more

CREDIT

Experiencing time in daily life Dan Zakay on the evidence behind beliefs ‘Time is all you’ve got’ We talk to John Wearden Children and time Sylvie Droit-Volet on what we can learn High time Ruth Ogden and Catharine Montgomery Time and the sleeping brain Penelope A. Lewis and Warren H. Meck

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www.thepsychologist.org.uk

BIG PICTURE

pull out

Untangling the web second series). She describes this as ‘a long-view about the true revolutionary nature of the web.

For example, in the episode about “capture”, we look at the web's effects on memory, and how our historical attempts at capturing phenomena throughout the ages reflect social hierarchies and power dynamics.’

She tells us: ‘I’m also pursuing my own academic study based in the Media and Communications Department of the LSE where I am a Visiting Fellow, funded by the Nominet Trust and Google. I am investigating how the designers of the web services we use every day have fit the “messy”, holistic human into binary systems: what have they chosen to include and what have they chosen to ignore? The first outcome of this line of inquiry is the “Serendipity Engine”, a system that critiques the assumptions Google have made about end-user attributions of insight, relevance and value. See tinyurl.com/serendipityengine for more information.’

COPYRIGHT GUARDIAN NEWS & MEDIA LTD 2010

Image by Lynsey Irvine and Peter Storey, for a series written by Aleks Krotoski. E-mail ideas for ‘Big picture’ to jon.sutton@bps.org.uk.

How has the most revolutionary innovation of our time – the internet – transformed our world? What does it mean for the modern family? How has it changed our concepts of privacy?

Of celebrity? Of love, sex and hate? Psychologist Dr Aleks Krotoski has been investigating, in a major series for The Guardian [see tinyurl.com/utwaleks). A book extending the series, Untangling the Web, is due out next month.

Krotoski has a PhD in social psychology from the University of Surrey, for a thesis which examined how information spreads around the social networks of the web. In February 2010, she presented The Virtual Revolution, a TV documentary series described by the BBC as ‘charting two decades of profound change since the invention of the World Wide Web, weighing up the huge benefits and the unforeseen downsides’. Followed by 20,000 on Twitter, she also presents the BBC Radio 4 series The Digital Human (back in October for a

When psychologists become builders 600 Jon Sutton investigates where Lego and psychology interact, with help from Uta Frith A look through the PRISM 604 David J. Cooke and Lorraine Johnstone on preventing violence in institutions

careers and psychologist appointments

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book reviews 608 time warped; evolutionary psychology; cyberbullying; British untouchables; and more

we talk to Jean Gross OBE and Tom Stafford; featured job; how to advertise; and all the latest vacancies new voices suppressed voices, neglected lives, by Romana Farooq in the latest of our articles from first-time authors

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society 614 international profile and more in the President’s column; guidance on the use of social media; honorary status in the Society; socially inclusive parenting; member engagement in Northern Ireland; forthcoming events; and more

looking back

638

the 1920 ‘grand tour’ of Great Britain by American psychologist Walter Miles, recounted by C. James Goodwin one on one

640

…with Ruby Bell

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Untangling the web How has the most revolutionary innovation of our time – the internet – transformed our world? What does it mean for the modern family? How has it changed our concepts of privacy?

Of celebrity? Of love, sex and hate? Psychologist Dr Aleks Krotoski has been investigating, in a major series for The Guardian [see tinyurl.com/utwaleks).

A book extending the series, Untangling the Web, is due out next month.

Krotoski has a PhD in social psychology from the University of Surrey, for a thesis which examined how information spreads around the social networks of the web. In February 2010, she presented The Virtual Revolution, a TV documentary series described by the BBC as ‘charting two decades of profound change since the invention of the World Wide Web, weighing up the huge benefits and the unforeseen downsides’. Followed by 20,000 on Twitter, she also presents the BBC Radio 4 series The Digital Human (back in October for a

second series). She describes this as ‘a long-view about the true revolutionary nature of the web.

For example, in the episode about “capture”, we look at the web's effects on memory, and how our historical attempts at capturing phenomena throughout the ages reflect social hierarchies and power dynamics.’

She tells us: ‘I’m also pursuing my own academic study based in the Media and Communications Department of the LSE where I am a Visiting Fellow, funded by the Nominet Trust and Google.

I am investigating how the designers of the web services we use every day have fit the “messy”, holistic human into binary systems: what have they chosen to include and what have they chosen to ignore? The first outcome of this line of inquiry is the “Serendipity Engine”, a system that critiques the assumptions Google have made about end-user attributions of insight, relevance and value. See tinyurl.com/serendipityengine for more information.’

COPYRIGHT GUARDIAN NEWS & MEDIA LTD 2010

Image by Lynsey Irvine and Peter Storey, for a series written by Aleks Krotoski. E-mail ideas for ‘Big picture’ to jon.sutton@bps.org.uk.

www.thepsychologist.org.uk

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MEDIA

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Sex and zombie cannibals Mark Sergeant with some potential lessons from recent media reports n the May 2011 issue I reported on Iduring the fallout of a ‘practical demonstration’ a human sexuality course led by Professor Mike Bailey at Northwestern University (tinyurl.com/0511media).

It appears that another human sexuality class has recently been receiving press attention.

Tom Kubistant runs a human sexuality course at Western Nevada College in the US. In a federal complaint filed on 25 June, Kubistant is alleged to have created a ‘sexually hostile class environment’ for a student (tinyurl.com/bv99lb2).

One of Kubistant’s students alleges that he asked class members to divulge information on topics such as any sexual abuse they had been the victim of, sexual behaviour with members of the same sex and also their current sexual preferences.

Specific items that students were, allegedly, asked to report on included what stimuli sexually aroused them, the different types of orgasm they could experience and details of how they

MEDIA PRIME CUTS

contribute

Toxoplasma’s dark side: The link between parasite and suicide http://t.co/yy1mk4sx The rise of the Cyberhero League http://t.co/w1Egxeis Need to get to safety in a riot? There’s an app for that http://t.co/J9UfxPR0 Charisma class: how to win fans and influence people http://t.co/5lfw8nmO Choke therapy: the sports stars who blew their big chance http://t.co/Wiy2RE4c Banking, testosterone and emotional intelligence http://t.co/uEBpkk9Q The psychology of procrastination, maybe read it later etc http://t.co/Sy9U3eHn

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The Media page is coordinated by the Society’s Media and Press Committee, with the aim of

stimulated themselves sexually. According to the complainant, Kubistant stated on the handout used to collect this data that he would not be reading this information because it was extremely personal.

Instead, submissions by students on these topics would simply be skimmed to make sure that students had provided a response.

The student bringing the federal complaint reports that they were the victim of abuse as a child and were distressed about having to reveal information about this as part of their studies. Allegedly the student’s concerns were dismissed by Kubistant, who stated that detailing her history of abuse as part of the class would be cathartic. Ken McKenna, the lawyer representing this student, indicated that Kubistant was violating professional standards by requiring students to reveal this information, stating: ‘You can’t just demand somebody reveal their sexual abuse when it could be psychologically harming, and it needs to be dealt with in a clinical setting instead of a classroom setting’.

At the start of this human sexuality course, Kubistant allegedly told students about the sensitive nature of the material to be discussed and asked students to sign an acknowledgement before taking the class. According to the complainant, Kubistant at no point indicated that students would be required to disclose information about their own sexual history and preferences.

A statement from Western Nevada College indicated they had initiated an

promoting and discussing psychology in the media. If you would like to contribute, please contact the ‘Media’

page coordinating editor, Ceri Parsons (Chair, Media and Press Committee), on c.parsons@staffs.ac.uk

investigation and reviewed the course information, assessments and the acknowledgement signed by the students.

Evaluations taken from students during the past six years were also being reviewed.

In the few days since the story broke it has generated media attention both in the US (tinyurl.com/dytaao7 and tinyurl.com/6lj8k6e) and the UK (tinyurl.com/bwgktnr and tinyurl.com/cbncze4).

This case, regardless of its outcome, does raise some interesting issues concerning the teaching of sexualityrelated topics in academia. Lecturers need to be sensitive to the individual needs and experiences of their students, be ethically aware when asking for sensitive information and always provide students with the option of declining to respond.

Developing alternative assignments is also a wise strategy.

Teaching sexualityrelated topics in academia can be a difficult task. It’s an area that I personally have been lecturing on for almost 10 years and it has taken a long time for me to develop the format of these lectures. I also have to give at least six separate disclaimers in my first lecture so students know exactly what to expect.

Media buzz around drugs On 26 May this year, press around the world reported on the case of the ‘Miami cannibal’ also know as the ‘Miami zombie attack’. Responding to 911 calls, police found a naked man, Rudy Eugene, biting the facial skin off an unconscious homeless man called Ronald Poppo.

When challenged by police, Eugene apparently just growled in response and continued to attack his victim. Eugene was then shot dead by police at the scene.

The extreme nature of the injuries received by the victim, and the highly unusual nature of the incident, caused the story to receive worldwide press attention. Reports which compared the incident to a zombie attack only served to further the media interest in the story (tinyurl.com/7ccmuha).

At the time, the alleged cause of the extreme behaviour by Eugene was attributed to a type of designer drug called ‘bath salts’, which results in similar reactions to those on cocaine or amphetamines. The drugs had also been

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linked to several other aggressive attacks in the Miami area. Moves to ban ‘bath salts’ were announced soon after the attack (tinyurl.com/7o88auv).

However, more recent toxicology reports showed that the only drug present in Eugene’s blood was actually marijuana (tinyurl.com/bqbcgvj). The precise motivation and cause of the attack is still being investigated but may never be clearly documented.

In the aftermath of the attack, some are questioning the rush to ban bath salts.

David Nutt, the former chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, wrote an article questioning this form of ‘knee-jerk’ reaction by legislators (tinyurl.com/bvkbrce). Nutt argues that ‘Bans are often a neat trick for placating voters, but have nothing to do with making society safer and happier’, suggesting that policies should instead be based on the production of hard evidence about the effects of drugs rather than just media reports on their effects. Nutt also drew parallels with the rush to ban mephedrone in the UK following its link to the death of two teenagers.

Toxicological reports, which showed that the drug was not involved in the death of the two teenagers, only emerged after the ban.

This story does give us insight into public attitudes towards extreme and troubling behaviours. Stories reported in the media with buzz words like ‘cannibalism’ or ‘zombies’ will always grab public attention. It is not uncommon for politicians to react quickly to these issues, sometimes resulting in premature legislation.

It is interesting, given toxicology reports of Eugene having tested positive only for marijuana, that this drug was also associated with highly politicised reports on its effects in the 1930s such as the, now discredited,’Reefer Madness’ (tinyurl.com/brs49pm).

MEDIA PRIME CUTS End the macho culture that turns women off science, says @AtheneDonald http://t.co/Ei1iNO1z Why you probably won’t experience your own traumatic death http://t.co/VXe8TKz4 Who puts the science in MPs’ in-trays? http://t.co/aLEwcBis Should minimally conscious patients be asked if they wish to die? http://t.co/81AFYolH

‘IT’S NOT YOU, IT’S US’ At 31, Jonah Lehrer appeared to be having the time of his life. Since graduating from Colombia University in 2003 with a major in neuroscience and work in Eric Kandel’s lab under his belt, Lehrer had carved out a successful niche as one of the early bloggers in the field of mind and behaviour.

He then wrote three successful books and landed a plum role as staff writer at The New Yorker. Admirers spoke of him as an ‘ideas man’ in the mould of Malcolm Gladwell. Then, in June, media commentator Jim Romenesko accused Lehrer of selfplagiarism, and suddenly it was open season.

Others unearthed articles where Lehrer had apparently recycled chunks of his earlier writing (links at tinyurl.com/ lehrerslate), and Twitter was awash with comment about the rights and wrongs of this practice. Many fellow authors didn’t think it was a big issue: journalist Jon Ronson tweeted that ‘Victor Lewis-Smith once defended his own [self-plagiarism] by saying nobody attacks Sinatra for constantly doing My Way’. Most comments I read from psychologists were similarly forgiving. But the kerfuffle continued for another few weeks, even taking in accusations of plagiarism proper (see tinyurl.com/ lehrermore).

Ultimately though, this seemed to be an issue for Lehrer and his editor to discuss.

Indeed Lehrer’s New Yorker work quickly had explanatory footnotes added and the author himself apologised: ‘It was a stupid thing to do and incredibly lazy and absolutely wrong.’ Perhaps more interesting, for our audience at least, was a blog post a week before the storm broke, from neuroscientist Bradley Votek (see tinyurl.com/lehrerdefend).

Votek opened his post, ‘Defending Jonah Lehrer’, by saying: ‘This is a strange post for me to write because I admit I’ve ridden the anti-Jonah bandwagon before, advocating throwing Jonah overboard to quell the pop neuroscience storms.’ Perhaps showing more honesty and self-analytical skill than many commentators, Votek admitted ‘that some of my anti-Lehrerism probably stems from righteous brain-nerd ego-driven indignation. Why does this dude get all the attention when he’s not even a neuroscientist?! He’s just a neuroscience roadie!’ That’s not fair, said Votek, and ‘neither is all the shit he’s getting’. In fact: ‘It’s not you, it’s us.’

So why is the neuroscientific community at fault for Lehrer’s ‘occasionally inaccurate scientific reporting’? ‘Because our own

read discuss contribute at www.thepsychologist.org.uk

house is in such disarray’, Votek wrote, citing ‘voodoo correlations’, ‘double dipping’ statistics in neuroimaging, and the strange case of the dead salmon in the fMRI scanner.

But there are also more subtle issues, according to Votek. ‘One of the main offenders living in our attic seems to be conflating the idea that because a brain region is active in one state – such as addiction – and in another task – such as mothers looking at pictures of their own babies – that babies are ‘addicting’… This makes about as much sense as saying that because I kiss with the same mouth-hole that I burp from, kissing and burping are essentially the same.’ In fact, Votek argues that dopaminergic neurons don’t get any sensory inputs early enough to make a ‘decision’ about the reward value of visual stimuli, and they are probably encoding salience (relevance).

Votek writes that ‘It turns out some of our strongest neuroscientific results could very well be wrong. Or, at the very least, they’re not nearly as cut and dry as they’re often made out to be. So how can we blame people like Mr Lehrer for linking dopamine with reward when that idea has been one of the major results…of the last 30 years?’

These errors are, according to Votek, running amok in our own scientific house.

Cognitive neuroscience grew out of experimental psychology, he says, ‘but with this legacy comes a lot of baggage... With the advent of neuroimaging techniques, psychologists put people in brain scanners to see where in the brain behaviours “were”. But this is the wrong way of thinking about these concepts. As cognitive neuroscientists, instead of asking, “where in the brain does this fuzzy concept occur?” we should be asking, “how can neurons give rise to behavioral phenomena that look like what we call creativity?”…we need to build upon what we’ve learned from decades of psychological research within a neuronal framework. Not just stick people into an fMRI, press some buttons on a computer that say “analyze”, and copy-and-paste the figures into a paper.’

Votek concludes that Lehrer needs to keep up the interesting writing. ‘Just… please be more skeptical of us. We don’t know nearly as much as you give us credit for.’ Perhaps, there, Votek has hit upon why we shouldn’t be so quick to judge and criticise authors like Lehrer, and how authors like him can play an important role in questioning and sharpening our own scientific thinking. JS

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Experiencing time in daily life Why does a watched pot never boil, or time fly when you’re having fun?

Dan Zakay has some answers

P

resource

The population is becoming older and older due to the increase in life expectancy. There are some indications of a phenomenon called ‘slowing down’ of the pace of time in the elderly, whereby time is perceived to be going slower than for young people. How might this phenomenon influence the daily life of elderly people?

Grondin, S. (Ed.) (2008). Psychology of time. Bingley: Emerald.

references

question

Time shapes human life and behaviour. Physical events proceed according to objective time and biological cycles are controlled by internal pacemakers, but psychological time – how humans experience it – differs in various important ways. Psychological time is discrete and non-continuous, non-linear, highly contextdependent and, as in a dream, does not necessarily flow from the past to the future. Psychological time is crucial in shaping a plethora of human behaviours, and this article examines the part it plays in many everyday activities.

Block, R.A. & Reed, M.A. (1978).

Remembered duration: Evidence for a contextual-change hypothesis.

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 4(6), 656–665.

Block, R.A. & Zakay, D. (1997).

Prospective and retrospective duration judgments: A meta-analytic review. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 4(2), 184–197.

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sychological time is a complex notion reflected in many types of experiences. Consider the last time you made a cup of coffee. Perhaps you wondered whether you had enough time to do it before your meeting; you recalled a particularly good recent cup of coffee you had, and how long ago that was; you recalled the order of events in time necessary to make the coffee; you perceived a rising tempo in the sound of the boiling kettle, almost like music; you planned (automatically and without awareness) the exact time to reach out and catch the falling spoon as it fell off the kitchen top; you estimated the duration of that process, and therefore whether it was time to go into the meeting.

These examples reflect a range of dimensions of time, to which humans must attend. Here we will focus only on the perception of duration, which is one of the most important aspects of psychological time.

How humans perceive duration The dimension of time is of clear importance for adaptation and orientation in the physical and social environment.

So it’s something of an evolutionary enigma that we are not equipped with a direct time perception mechanism.

Researchers assume that time perception is derived indirectly via certain physiological and cognitive processes, and as a result our sense of time is inaccurate and easily biased. You can demonstrate this by asking a group of people to clap

Brown, S.W. (1994). Attentional resources in timing: Interference effects in concurrent temporal and nontemporal working memory tasks.

Attention, Perception & Psychophysics, 50(7), 1118–1140.

Droit-Volet, S., Brunot, S. & Niedenthal, P.M. (2004). Perception of the duration of emotional events.

Cognition & Emotion, 18(6), 849–858.

Loftus, E.F., Schooler, J.E., Boone, S.M. &

17 seconds after you do. You may be surprised to find that there will be a wave of hand clapping, and the diversity of accuracy in estimating the duration of time will be high.

Before going on to describe and explain the phenomena in time-duration judgements, I would like to draw a general picture of time perception and the processes underlining it.

Retrospective timing Imagine you try to recall how long a film was, or how much time it took you to type a report. In such cases the interval itself doesn’t exist any more; what is left of it are only memory traces. The outcome is ‘retrospective duration’.

The main model that explains retrospective timing is called the ‘contextual change model’. The idea is that our cognitive system is trying to retrieve from memory all the data we stored there during the target-interval whose duration we are trying to estimate. Retrospective estimation of a past event’s duration is based on the naive assumption that the more data that was stored in memory during an interval, the longer that interval should be. Thus, retrospective estimation of duration assigns longer durations for intervals when the amount of retrieved information is high, than for intervals for whom the amount of respectively retrieved information is low.

The problem is that in reality, during identical clock-time intervals, more or less information can be stored in memory depending on factors other than actual duration itself. One factor is the intensity of information processing in which one is engaged. For example, when one is asked to solve difficult arithmetic problems such as complex multiplication, more data will be stored in memory as compared with a same clock-time interval during which one is asked to perform simple addition problems. The result will be that the retrospective ‘multiplication interval’ will be estimated to be longer than the ‘addition interval’. In a classic study,

Klein, D. (1987). Time went by so slowly: Overestimation of events' durations by males and females.

Applied Cognitive Psychology, 1, 3–13.

Ornstein, R.E. (1975). On the experience of time. New York: Penguin.

Poynter, W.D. (1983). Duration judgment and the segmentation of experience.

Memory & Cognition, 11(1), 77–82.

Roy, M.M. (2011). The return trip effect: Why the return trip often seems to

take less time. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 18(5), 827–832.

Wearden, J.H., Norton, R., Martin, S. & Montford-Bebb, O. ( 2007). Internal clock processes and the filledduration illusion. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance, 33(3), 716–729.

Zakay, D. (1998). Attention allocation policy influence prospective timing.

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Suppose that one person is asked to perform arithmetic exercises for a given duration; another is asked to do nothing for the same interval. Who will give the greatest estimate?

Ornstein (1975), presented participants with either a simple or a very complex figure (a circle or an irregular polygon, respectively) and asked them to memorise them. Later on the participants were asked to retrospectively estimate the exposure duration of each figure. Though exposure

Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 5(1), 114–118.

Zakay, D. (2000). Gating or switching? Gating is a better model of prospective timing.

Behavioural Processes, 50, 1–7.

Zakay, D., Tsal, Y., Moses, M. & Shahar, I. (1994). The role of segmentation in prospective and retrospective time estimation processes. Memory & Cognition, 22(3), 344–351.

was identical in terms of clock-time, those participants who were exposed to the simple figure estimated exposure duration to be significantly shorter when compared to participants exposed to complex figures: much less information needed to be stored in memory.

A second factor is the amount of contextual changes occurring during the interval. The reason is that contextual changes (e.g. changes in background noise or level of lighting in room) are encoded and stored in memory alongside any other task-related information. While trying to make a retrospective estimation of duration, contextual changes are retrieved together with other information types, thus compounding the overall amount of retrieved information. Block and Read’s (1978) experiment involved participants engaging in identical information-

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time

processing tasks for a fixed interval. Some participants were exposed to changes in room lighting, the other participants were not exposed to any contextual changes.

Consequently, the group exposed to change estimated the duration of the target interval as significantly longer than those not exposed.

A third factor refers to the level of segmentation into meaningful subintervals. The more an interval is segmented, the longer its retrospective duration estimation will be (Poynter, 1983). Intervals are segmented by highpriority events (HPEs), which attract attention, are stored in memory and are easily retrieved later on. Such HPEs act as cues, facilitating the retrieval of information from memory, thus enabling the retrieval of a larger amount of information leading to longer retrospective duration estimations. Contextual changes are most probably acting as HPEs. Indeed, Block and Read (1978) suggested that changes in the type of information that should be processed, the context or the mood one experiences during an interval have a high probability of being retrieved, and they concluded that retrospective duration judgement is actually based on the amount of changes of any sort that occurred during the target interval. This is an interesting conclusion because it suggests that the notion of retrospective time is very similar to the notion of physical time: they both reflect change, which might be mental or physical, respectively. The ‘Filled-Time Illusion’ (Wearden et al., 2007), which refers to the common experience that in retrospect intervals filled with intensive mental activity are recalled as longer than same clock-time intervals that were ‘empty’ of mental activity, is well explained by the contextual change model.

Prospective timing Suppose that one person is asked to perform difficult arithmetic exercises for a given duration; another is asked to perform a simple arithmetic exercise; and a third is asked to do nothing during the same interval. Before beginning, all three are told that upon the completion of the interval they will have to estimate its duration as accurately as possible. What will the outcome be?

Many similar studies using different types of mental activities have been performed (Brown, 1994; Zakay, 1998).

Results indicate that the identical intervals will be estimated as longest by the person who was doing nothing during the time, the second longest estimation will be given by the person engaged in simple arithmetic

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and the shortest will be provided by the relaxing during a long vacation). In these one who was occupied by the difficult cases only few attentional resources are arithmetic. This is a powerful finding: allocated for time and the gate becomes remember, if the duration estimation was narrow, allowing for a low number of done retrospectively – if the three signals to be accumulated by the participants were not told in advance that accumulator during a given interval. they would have to estimate the duration – Assuming that the feeling of an interval the inverse effect would be obtained (Block duration is a function of the count in the & Zakay, 1997). accumulator, the same objective interval These findings indicate that (say, 30 seconds) will be perceived as retrospective and prospective timing are longer while waiting than while relaxing. based on different cognitive processes.

There are two major factors that Whereas retrospective timing is based on determine the amount of attentional memory processes as explained earlier, resources allocated for prospective time. prospective timing is based The first is ‘temporal on attentional processes. relevance’, which This conclusion was further indicates how important “in many situations it is supported by Zakay et al. it is in a specific situation advantageous to cause (1994), who showed that to be aware of the people to experience level of segmentation of an passage of time. The durations as short” interval only has an impact higher the temporal on retrospective duration relevance, the more estimation, not on attentional resources will be prospective ones. allocated, the wider the opening of the gate The attentional gate model (Zakay, and therefore the longer the estimate of 2000) provides an explanation for duration. The second factor is the amount prospective timing. It is based on the scalar of attentional resources required for expectancy theory (SET) model, which is performing a concurrent nontemporal an internal clock model that successfully activity. Attentional resources are limited predicts and explains time-based and have to be divided between all the behaviours (e.g. time conditioning) in activities taking place simultaneously. animals. In this model, the internal clock Therefore when facing a demanding consists of some sort of a pacemaker nontemporal task, more attention is that emits signals continuously and with consumed by the task and less attention a constant, steady tempo. The signals is allocated for timing. emitted in a given interval are read and Now we can explain why prospective counted by a component called an duration judgement produces a mirror accumulator. The count of signals during a effect to retrospective judgement. Take, target interval is stored in memory and can for example, the Ornstein study (1975). be used to represent the duration of that In retrospect, the exposure duration of a interval. An organism can repeat certain complex geometrical figure is longer than durations by counting the signals until the exposure duration of a simple figure there is a match between the new count because in the complex figure more and a former one. This does not require information was processed, sorted and any awareness of the passage of time. later on retrieved from memory than in the Humans, on the other hand, are aware simple figure case. However, if exposure of the passage of time and are highly duration estimation is done prospectively, influenced by attentional demands during then memorising the complex figure a target interval. Thus, another component demanded more attentional resources than should be added to the SET model in order memorising a simple figure. The result is to fit the human prospective duration that in the first case fewer attentional estimation. This component is called the resources are left for timing than in the ‘attentional gate’, which regulates the second case. This will lead to a narrow amount of signals emitted by a pacemaker gate and low count of signals in the first and subsequently counted by an case and a wider gate, leading to a high accumulator during a given interval. The count of signals in the second case. gate can become ‘wide’ or ‘narrow’ depending on the amount of attentional Explaining daily time-dependent resources allocated for timing. The more experiences attentional resources allocated for timing So let’s summarise the principles that (like in cases in which the passage of time determine the perception of durations: is very important, such as waiting for an I If awareness to time is not important, important meeting) the wider the opening duration estimation will be of the gate, the higher the count in the retrospective. As such, it will be longer accumulator in comparison to a case in for intervals in which high informationwhich time is not important (such as

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processing load was required, when compared to intervals for which the information-processing load was low.

Whenever the relevance and importance of time is high, timing automatically becomes prospective. In such situations the more attention that is allocated directly for time, the longer the duration will be experienced.

When duration judgement is prospective and is accompanying a concurrent nontemporal task, the more demanding the concurrent task is the shorter the duration estimation of the interval during which the task was performed will be.

So how can we apply these principles to some common situations?

A ‘watched pot’ never boils, and earthquakes feel longer than they are When one is watching a pot waiting for the water to boil, time is of the utmost relevance – the person is occupied with the question ‘When will the water boil?’.

This means that timing will be prospective, the gate will be widely open and the count of signals in the accumulator will be high. This will cause the ongoing experience of the passage of time to become very long. Similarly, when waiting for a friend to join us, for a traffic light to turn green or a call centre to answer us, we focus our attention on when it will happen: there’s high temporal relevance.

Similarly, some studies indicate that people experience the duration of earthquakes in the range of minutes, as compared with its actual range of 30–40 seconds (Loftus et al., 1987). The passage of time during an earthquake is highly relevant: it is a threatening event and people want it to terminate as soon as possible. They focus on ‘When will it be over?’, the attentional gate is wide open and the duration estimation becomes longer.

The ‘return trip’ feels shorter When we have to be somewhere at a certain time for an important event, on the way there time relevance is high. That is why prospectively we experience the duration as being longer. Returning to the starting point, although it is exactly the same distance, feels in many cases shorter than going there because time is not that important and so our attention is diverted or distracted by events occurring around us (Roy, 2011).

Time flies when we are having fun, but a boring lecture never ends When we focus our attention on a good

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book, a movie or that special someone, and we don’t have any obligations, the time relevance is low. The gate will be narrow and the signal count low. We may feel that time is not passing, but if we look at our watch we will be amazed to see how much clock time has elapse without our noticing.

Attending a boring lecture is like being in ‘empty’ time, because the information seems to be not useful for us so we are not processing it. Most of our attentional resources will be allocated to prospective timing, and again the gate model provides an explanation for the experience of duration in such cases.

Time slows when we are in pain When we are in pain, temporal relevance becomes high, leading to the feeling that the pain is going on and on. Emotions in general are known to influence and sometimes distort time perception. For example, Droit-Volet et al. (2004) found that exposure duration of pictures of emotional faces were overestimated compared to neutral ones. The attentional gate model might explain why we are relatively inaccurate in making timing judgements during emotional

experiences. In some cases emotions demand attentional resources for coping with them, and then duration estimations will be underestimated. In other cases, especially when emotions have a threatening meaning like in the case of fear or pain, time relevance will be high.

In such cases the duration estimation will be overestimated.

Conclusions What are the implications of all this? Well, in many situations it is advantageous to cause people to experience durations as short. Think of shops, call centres or in amusement parks. If people experience boring, long waits they might leave, taking their money with them. So such venues might attempt to shorten duration experiences by, for example, diverting attention from time to nontemporal, interesting attractive events. In amusement parks there are usually activities such as TV screens showing cartoons distributed along the queue, or clowns going around; in a call centre, background music will be used. Such activities divert people’s attention away from time.

The nature of the cognitive processes involved in duration estimation causes the experience of time to be relativistic: in psychological time, the same clock interval may be over- or underestimated depending on the factors we have explored.

Retrospective time-duration estimations are based on the amount of information about changes retrieved from memory, while prospective time-duration estimations are based on the ‘reading’ of the internal clock. As a result, our sense of time is not accurate, though in most cases it is sufficient for our needs. The contextual change model and the attentional gate model provide explanations for most of our daily experiences of duration, but there are so many important dimensions of time that further research will continue to deepen our understanding of the field for many years to come.

Dan Zakay is Professor of Cognitive Psychology at the Interdisciplinary Center, Herzeliya, and Tel-Aviv University, Israel dzakay@post.tau.ac.il

Extra time In addition to four more pieces in this issue, we also have two online-only articles.

For Clare Allely (University of Glasgow) on how emotions cloud our sense of time and Luke Jones (University of Manchester) on time and information processing, see www.thepsychologist.org.uk

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INTERVIEW

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‘Time is all you’ve got’ Catherine Loveday and Jon Sutton talk to John Wearden

eople can make surprisingly P accurate judgements of time, albeit in a relative sense. Why is that so important?

Well, in order to make movements, to predict when thing are going to happen, it’s quite important to have a timemeasuring system. If it’s too distorted, I would reach out for these glasses and not be able to pick them up. So the system must adjust itself somehow to be accurate, and this may explain the fact that there are no people as bad at timing as amnesiacs are at memory. There are certain groups who, in some experiments, have got timing deficits, but these are very small, so it’s incredibly robust. But then, if you’ve got fundamental timing systems keeping you alive, can you have very a distorted timing system and still perceive, move…

Thinking of it as an evolved sense, imagine walking through a forest and you hear a rustling in the bushes, and the sound coming to different ears is a few milliseconds different, but the triangulation allows you to pinpoint it.

There are apparently deep connections between time perception and information processing more generally, but we’re only dipping our toe into that really. It would suggest that if your timing was very distorted then you wouldn’t be able to do memory experiments, you probably wouldn’t be able to perceive things correctly. So it’s not terribly surprising that you never get a group who are normal but they can’t time timing at all. How could they speak if their time sense is faulty?

It seems almost impossible, like in Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius, he is in a world without time and it’s impossible to imagine what that would be like.

So in searching for an actual neural substrate, you’re hampered by two things: one, this lack of a patient group, and two you haven’t got an organ – in vision, audition, gustation, you can trace the connections – it goes somewhere, this surely must be involved to some degree.

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It’s a bit like consciousness in that way.

Yes, you do an fMRI on a timing task and 27 areas light up. Sure, there’s lots of work going on, and there are usual suspects, but control and the use of different timing tasks are real problems. And then when you get real-life timing it’s possible the mechanisms are quite different.

flash of a lightbulb or the persistence of a scent.

Certainly, you seem to automatically measure the duration, at least to some degree, of events that occur, or you can reconstruct some kind of measure of duration. If you were given two tones that differed in intensity and nobody mentioned how long they lasted, then they asked you if they differed in duration as well, if they differed fairly markedly in duration you’d be able to detect this, even though you didn’t know this was the focus of the task. It’s almost as if it comes in addition, it’s almost impossible to switch off.

And it’s very linked to memory, I suppose.

This is possibly true for other things as well: if you had an experiment that was presented as a shape discrimination, but you were suddenly asked ‘Did the green one come first or the red one?’, I’d be very surprised if people couldn’t tell you. It may not be that peculiar to time, maybe you analyse the stimulus and its temporal aspects are just one of the things that you store, whether you store it for very long.

In terms of real-life timing, it’s interesting that in the early days of television the engineers went to great lengths to synchronise the sound and the images, then they realised that as long as the delay was less than a hundred milliseconds, no one noticed Is memory behind many of our realit. How come the brain is so good at life time experiences, and the sayings distinguishing that, but it can override surrounding them, like ‘Time flies it? when you’re having fun’?

Well, this is a real issue. One of the With colleagues at John Moore’s findings, again, something which has University, we did a questionnaire study. been known since the 19th century and ‘Fast time’ anecdotes, time when you were something I have worked on, is the enjoying yourself, were all of the difference between visual and auditory following sort: ‘I went to a club with stimuli. If you present tones or squares my mates and then when we went out, of colour on a screen, the I looked at my watch and it tones appear to last about was four o’clock’, therefore, 20 per cent longer than time must have passed “I thought it was like the visual stimuli. When quickly. There are two things: a message from a you tell people this, (1) they got an external time they’re always terribly marker, and (2) the idea that distant star” surprised and they say, it had passed quickly was ‘Why haven’t we noticed clearly an inference. They didn’t this in real life?’ Well, feel it passing quickly when they there’s the possibility that for meaningful were having fun, they didn’t feel it at all! stimuli, this effect doesn’t actually occur.

I used to think you could measure the We’ve got a couple of unpublished temporal phenomenology somehow, experiments where we’ve looked at film during the event, if you were clever clips. They watch the vision without the enough, but of course you can’t. The sound or they just listen to the sound, idea that time has passed quickly is an and then you get them to retrospectively inference based on clock time. It’s like my estimate the duration. No effect at all. mother, who lives on her own, says the So it’s only in the lab, in slightly artificial days seem to last for ever, but the months situations, that people show this effect. flash past. When the time marker comes I thought it was like a message from at the end of the day – the six o’clock a distant star, it’s telling you something news, or time to make dinner – that’s important but you don’t know what. the time marker and nothing’s happened, therefore it must have flashed by. But I’m interested in the way time seems when they’re in it, it doesn’t flash by. to ride over the other senses, so it’s a meta-sense – time is involved in the I know you’ve tried to get funding to

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research time experiences in the elderly and several other real-life projects, including waiting time at airports.

Inside me there is an epic, apocalyptic moan about failing to get grant funding, but I don’t really want to dwell on that.

The problem of funding is very acute and always has been for time perception in Britain. As far as I know, hardly anyone’s ever received money for it, for reasons which are not at all clear. And this has hampered research in a more general way – if you can’t get money, you can’t have post-docs, who then become lecturers, who then become professors, and so on.

Science journalists quite often ask ‘Why don’t you study that?’. If someone would give me some money, I would!

What you tend to find is that people’s careers might start out with time perception and then they fizzle out, particularly these days where that academic is partly a fund-raiser for the university, so to work in something where you can’t get money is frowned upon. So mainly people have to work on their own, or in small groups, and there’s a limit to what you can do – you can do a psychophysical experiment, but you can’t do an experience sampling methodology study lasting months without having research assistants and big infrastructure.

Alfred Bester, where you can get an augmentation to yourself, like a kind of martial art where temporarily you’re just speeded up, so you know the mugger approaches you, and you just accelerate…

But of course does it really do so or do you just think it does, and how can you replicate those situations?

David Eagleman tried, didn’t he… getting people to jump off towers.

Eagleman wanted to find a situation that provoked this sensation of being in a lifethreatening situation, and of course ethically it’s very difficult to do! What he found was that people remembered the duration of the fall as longer than it was, but he was looking at another thing as

But you’ve got to be careful here. If you precede tones and lights with a series of clicks, they seem to last longer. But do they only speed up your time perception or do they really speed you up? Do your psychological processes take place in subjective time or real time? Can you get more in if your psychological time is speeded up? Well, the answer tentatively is yes. Our work in the Quarterly Journal of Psychology in 2011 has shown that reaction times are actually faster if your reaction time is preceded by a train of clicks: you can go faster than you could possibly go. Things like the Sperling memory task, you can actually get more off the eye card, as if you actually had more time to do it. The effects are quite small, but it looks as if there is some deep connection between psychological time and information processing. But maybe they’re the same thing, or both reflections of some internal time system!

Does the internal physiology change – for example, does heart-rate go up?

No, it doesn’t, there’s no physiological effect – the click trains are boring as hell! There may be changes in brain activity, but…

…no funding!

So if you did have the bottomless You’ve mentioned external purse, that would be the one? time markers, and the effect Yes, I’d maybe try and look at the that they have on your perception of time and the passage subsequent memory of of time in the elderly. The scientific events. You wear a watch, I literature is a bit confused, but if you notice. I don’t (JS), and I try to John Wearden is a Professor of Psychology at Keele get old people into the lab, they’re not avoid external time markers University (for more information see much different from anyone else. as much as possible. Would They’re more variable and possibly less tinyurl.com/weardenj) you predict that would have Catherine Loveday is a Principal Lecturer at the accurate sometimes… they’re worse any effect on our real-life University of Westminster than students, but they’re worse than experience of time?

Jon Sutton is Managing Editor of The Psychologist Well, one of Dan Zakay’s ideas students at everything… they don’t is that your time experience is have particular timing deficits. So this affected by two variables: thing about time getting faster as you temporal relevance and temporal well. He had a digital display, with a grow older, and people feeling that uncertainty. So is time important in the number that was going faster than you time drags terribly in their daily lives, is situation, and how uncertain is it? He could see. If your psychological processes related to things you can’t easily duplicate said that people have a heightened were speeded up, you would be able to in the lab. experience of time passing in situations see it, but they couldn’t see it. So he I guess interest, arousal and emotion of high temporal relevance and high concluded that it was a memory effect. would also be important in these realtemporal uncertainty. The obvious one is In any case, you can easily give people life studies. if you’re going to the airport and there’s the phenomenal sense of time dragging.

There’s obviously been this idea that in a traffic jam, and you don’t know whether All you need to do is put them in a very high states of emotional arousal, you will miss your plane. In underground supermarket queue, where you think the time appears to stand still. If you think systems now they give you a countdown person in front of you has only got two about it that would be very evolutionarily to the next train arriving, and that seems jars of jam, and then they want to pay by sensible, as you’re really speeded up in to remove at least part of the aversiveness Uzbekistan credit card! But would you comparison with the outside world. of the waiting experience. And that Zakay necessarily mis-estimate the interval?

There’s this 1950s science fiction book stuff makes sense… whether you could That’s almost a purely phenomenological was called The Stars My Destination by actually apply ideas of time relevance and effect.

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certainty just by asking people, nobody has ever done it.

If you want to work on real-life timing, the real challenge is to design situations which are enough like real life to capture the essence of it, but not so much that it’s impossible to understand what’s really going on. Film clips seem to be complicated: people have talked about the importance of segmentation, the number of different things which happen, but it’s very difficult to judge.

That’s presumably one of the main things that a film director is doing, it’s about getting that timing, that pace right.

There’s work on the use of time in films, to create suspense. Boring events, like someone getting out of their car and walking to a door, are often collapsed, whereas something like James Bond cuffed to the atomic bomb in Goldfinger has to be slowed down to get more and more things in. They’ve known all about these things for years, just as Bach and Telemann knew about auditory stream segmentation before Bregman’s book on it, and in fact he now illustrates it with them.

Similarly, the operas of Wagner gain their power from their enormous length and repetition.

You used to play double bass in the National Youth Orchestra, so that link between time perception and music, particularly I suppose with rhythmic parts like bass and drums…

Well the odd thing is that time and rhythm perception have proceeded on largely different lines for years, with very little interaction between them. There’s been work on time in music, by Marie Rhys-Jones and Marianne Boltz who was her pupil, but it’s more about tonal expectancies and how you can manipulate how long things seem to last.

There are common ideas though, such as the use of the pacemaker…

I think there’s the difference between rhythmic perception and rhythmic production as well.

Well, John Gibbon said that was the most profound problem in the whole of time psychology: when does a rhythm become a rhythm? I give you two clicks – click click – and you have to make some judgement about the duration between them. Then I give you three clicks, or four. I bet the precision of judgement of the interval increases markedly when you

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have a whole series, but how many do you need?

rarely in real music required to produce an exact 500ms beat, it only has to be relatively correct.

It’s interesting as well that I’m interested in music… when I was rhythmically we tend to quantise those 49-years old I decided I should learn beats, so something has the feeling of something about 20th-century music – a beat but we notice those serial Schoenbergian-type stuff. That has imprecisions. been an interesting adventure, and they Of course in real life it’s generally relative have all kinds of interesting things that rather than absolute. For example, when they do with time. You do find yourself I was in the National in a minority of one Youth Orchestra, before though, I have to the conductor came in for listen to it on “the real challenge is to the rehearsal we used to headphones because design situations which are tune up. We were doing my wife can’t possibly enough like real life” Berlioz’ overture Le listen to it!

Corsaire, which has I find it quite difficult, different sections to it, I have to say (CL). there’s a slow bit in the middle. And one You have to listen to it about 50 times, of the violinists started playing the start of that’s the thing. Schoenberg’s alright, he Le Corsaire, and somebody else joined in, sounds like Brahms after a while! and very soon the whole orchestra was Ferneyhough, he’s the guy! Listen to his playing Le Corsaire. While we were doing Second and Third String Quartets if you all this the conductor walked in, but just want to hear something totally amazing. gestured for us to carry on, and we did There just seems to be no temporal structure at all, although of course it’s all very carefully calculated.

Perhaps more important in real life isn’t time perception, it’s your own personal view of time, how you see time progressing in your life.

I’m not so susceptible to this thing of time getting faster as you get older. I’m a bit sceptical about it and in fact I’m right to be. An actual study by Wittmann and Lehnhoff found that most people didn’t actually agree with that! But my children are grown up, I’m coming to the end of my career… …‘the rapidly darkening twilight of my career’, you said to me!

Absolutely! Obviously I had a heart attack a couple of years ago, even though I’m a low-risk subject, which didn’t have much of an effect but it makes you think about things a bit. the whole 15 minutes. Now there’s no conductor, no external time. Is that some impossible, miraculous feat of timing done by virtuoso players? Not at all, it’s dead easy.

It’s football terraces.

Yes, they’re not very good at it though!

They always sing the National Anthem too fast or slow. But it’s not at all difficult to do, and musicians do that kind of thing all the time. Everything was relatively timed correctly, but it wasn’t necessarily absolutely timed correctly.

It may be that it lasted longer when we played it on our own. But you’re very

It makes you think about and appreciate time more, take each day as it comes, those old maxims?

Doesn’t seem to, I waste just as much time as ever! It makes you think that you should do things you want to do: good and bad things! But you do look at different periods… does it only seem a short period of time since my children were young? In some ways it does, but then if you try to fill in in memory all the things you have done, obviously it seems like an enormous amount of time.

It certainly makes you more selfindulgent though. Time is all you’ve got: if you want to see a place, you should go.

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Blogging on brain and behaviour The British Psychological Society’s free Research Digest service: blog, email, Twitter and Facebook ‘An amazingly useful and interesting resource’ Ben Goldacre, The Guardian

www.researchdigest.org.uk/blog ‘big picture’ pull-out www.thepsychologist.org.uk

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FEATURE

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play, learning and creativity (see learninginstitute.lego.com). ‘I don’t think there is one thing which makes Lego so special,’ he says, ‘but they have clearly got quite a few things right. One feature which I think is significant is that the entry level of physical skill required to build with Lego is quite low. I have played with other construction kits where just the physical Jon Sutton investigates where Lego and psychology intersect demands of fixing it together rather got in the way of the creativity and problemsolving opportunities. With Lego even quite young children can quickly start to put together models; it’s easy to build, easy I have managed to use Lego in Highfield (author and executive at to change your ideas and undo and a professional capacity – mostly in the National Museum of Science and rebuild.’ assessment exercises, but also as Industry) has said, ‘a surprising number Others see Lego as a strong tool for the basis for a spatial reasoning test. of people care about the aesthetic appeal mental self-development. Writer Curtis These isolated moments represent of these little colourful blocks’.

Silver says that working with Lego taught the high points of my practice.

But why? And how have these us two things about directions: ‘First, it Everything else is dull and enthusiasts used Lego in their practice, taught us to follow them. The bag being monochrome by comparison. research and teaching? dumped out onto the ground – that was Alan Redman (Current Chair of the chaos. The instructions guiding you British Psychological Society’s Division through putting the pieces together – that of Occupational Psychology) What makes Lego different? was order. Second, it taught us to discard David Whitebread is Senior Lecturer the directions, add the new bag to the here are 62 pieces of Lego for every in Psychology and Education at the current pieces and make whatever the person in the world, and I certainly University of Cambridge, and a member hell you wanted. This drove our minds have more than my fair share. What of the LEGO Learning Institute – a group crazy with sick organisational delight as was little more than a passing interest in of experts advising the LEGO Group on children – the possibilities of what we childhood built into something of an could build!’ obsession when I had my own children, Psychologist and I should probably abandon the Charles Fernyhough pretence I am buying it for them.

(University of One purchase last Christmas was a Durham) reinforces book titled The Cult of LEGO (Baichtal & this point. ‘What Meno, 2011), and in this I read about strikes me as Lego-based social development therapy at particularly New Jersey’s Center for Neurological and interesting about Neurodevelopmental Health. Personal Lego is that it is and professional interest came together, non-representational and the foundations were laid for this material that can be article. made to be The cement, though, was the feedback representational – from other psychologists when I started although of course sharing the intersect of psychology and that has changed in Lego on Twitter. Uta Frith (University recent years with College London) encouraged me to write more and more an article, saying ‘the idea of a Lego cult pieces being is in no way exaggerated’. She even specifically ‘Non-representational material that can be made to be penned her own contribution, a ‘fan letter representational, representational’ to Lego’ (see ‘Dear Lego…’). As Roger depicting specific

When psychologists become builders

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Baichtal, J. & Meno, J. (2011). The cult of LEGO. San Francisco: No Starch Press.

Choi, J.-S. & Kim, J.J. (2010). Amygdala regulates risk of predation in rats foraging in a dynamic fear

environment. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1010079108 Clayton, N.S. & Dickinson, A. (1998).

Episodic-like memory during cache recovery by scrub jays. Nature, 395, 272–278.

Farr, W., Yuill, N. & Raffle, H. (2010).

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Farr, W., Yuill, N. & Hinkse, S. (2012). An augmented toy and social interaction in children with autism. International Journal of Arts and Technology, 5, 104–125.

Hinds, P.J. (1999). The curse of expertise: The effects of expertise and debiasing methods on predictions of novice performance. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 5, 205–221.

Kuba, M.J., Byrne, R.A., Meisel, D.V. & Mather, J.A. (2006). When do octopuses play? Effects of repeated testing, object type, age, and food deprivation on object play in Octopus vulgaris. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 120, 184–190.

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characters, tools, features.’ Others have bemoaned this trend.

Evolutionary neurobiologist Mark Changizi investigated biological networks and human-built ones, and found that unlike a biological network such as a brain, Lego required a rapidly increasing number of special piece types in order to build complex structures. ‘I suspect that the number of piece types would rise much more slowly than this were we to look at the Lego sets of the 1970s and 80s. My data support what users of old-school Legos intuitively feel: that Lego is no longer the freeformed “clay” it once was, and more like a model set with pre-formed uses – hello, Geonosian Starfighter! – and also pre-formed limits.’

However, to some the mix of basic bricks and more complex pieces and figures in Lego is a valuable feature. David Whitebread says: ‘When you watch children playing with Lego they are often problemsolving with the constructional aspects and involving themselves in a world of pretence at the same time.

I don’t recall that from my own childhood endeavours with, say, Meccano, where the process of building was very valuable but more demanding, and so effectively closed out the imaginative aspects.’

Encouraging this combination of rule-based and imaginative, themed play has made Lego attractive for use in psychological practice.

Lego and autism Built as it is on a rule-based, mechanical system, Lego lends itself to therapy with children on the autistic spectrum. More than 15 years ago, clinical psychologist Daniel LeGoff (nominative determinism alert!) saw that children with autism and other neurobehavioural disorders were naturally attracted to Lego when presented with a room full of toys (see www.thecnnh.org/lego.html). LeGoff began

Norton, M.I., Mochon, D. & Ariely, D. (2011). The IKEA effect: When labor leads to love. Journal of Consumer Psychology. doi:10.1016/j.jcps.2011.08 Owens, G., Granader, Y., Humphrey, A. & Baron-Cohen, S. (2008). LEGO therapy and the Social Use of Language Programme: An evaluation of two social skills interventions for children with high functioning autism and Asperger syndrome. Journal of Autism

Dear Lego… yours, Uta Frith What is it about you, Lego?

I feel the pull of two opposites: my incurably romantic side that is longing for anything miniature, childlike and playful, and my totally nerdy side that craves collecting, dissecting, and exploring. Lego, you make the perfect marriage between these worlds. This is why I am your natural born fan. From the first encounter I could not resist your Mondrian-like hard edge, primary colour, and at the same time sweet and lovable pieces. I love the sensory pleasure of the feel and sound of the bricks, so clean and exact. What could be more satisfying than the sound of little bricks clicking together and the characteristic sound of burrowing in a full box. You feel reassuringly firm yet light. There is the thrill of the sheer abundance of combinatorial possibilities you provide. Then there is the joy of a new start every time

I break up some previous construction, and it is allowed to be both sense and nonsense. Here is one of my secret joys when rummaging in seemingly inexhaustible quantities of colourful elements: I am making lovely little modules that can be inserted in ambitiously complex structures, and it feels just like building models of the mind. I become dimly aware of replicating structures as I watch my grandchildren getting absorbed in Lego play. They’re only toddlers now, but soon they will show their own children how to click the bricks together and pull them apart again. Will they be using the same bricks? I hope so.

Recycle and recombine.

For me you are one of those legends that transcend change in fashion and leaps in technology. Just like your abstract cousin, language, you continuously re-use and reinvent your elements. You

using Lego in a therapeutic and structured way in order to naturally reinforce appropriate social behaviour. Then a PhD project at Cambridge University – Gina Owens under the supervision of Simon Baron-Cohen (Owens et al., 2008) – gave 6- to 11-year-olds with high functioning autism either Lego therapy, the Social Use of Language Programme, or no intervention. After one hour a week building in pairs or small groups, for 18 weeks, the Lego therapy group had improved more than the other groups on

and Developmental Disorders, 38, 1944–1957.

Pike, C. (2002). Exploring the conceptual space of LEGO: Teaching and learning the psychology of creativity. Psychology Learning & Teaching, 2(2), 87–94.

Shelton, A.L., Clements-Stephens, A.M., Lam, W.Y., et al. (2011). Should social savvy equal good spatial skills? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. doi: 10.1037/a0024617

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have long started to import more and more semantics by offering me little people and little symbols as pre-prepared play elements. At first I was afraid this would destroy the purely abstract qualities of the game, but soon it became irresistible to connect a tiny Darth Vader incongruously with a flower. I also admit to being amused by the idea of ‘Serious Play’. Pinstriped kits for the board room and the executive office? Permission to be creative when no longer a child? I have never needed an excuse for play. After all, according to Einstein, play is the highest form of research.

I don’t even need my own special box of elements – as in research it is best to share and to re-use.

With tender thoughts of never-ending combinations, your devoted fan, Professor Uta Frith University College London

autism-specific social interaction scores, and interacted with others in the playground for longer.

Gina Owens, now Gina Gomez and a Research Psychologist at the University of Cambridge and Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Foundation Trust, picks up the story. ‘The groups were a success – the children enjoyed it, benefited in terms of their social skills – though there were lots of individual differences – and parents were very satisfied that children could attend a social group that they didn’t find anxiety provoking or stressful.’

But were the benefits specific to Lego?

‘I think you could in theory use any building block, stickle brick, etc to the same ends,’ Gomez replies. ‘You can even use the same approach to bake a cake – splitting up the roles, joint focus, etc. But having said that, Lego is extremely versatile. You can be creative but within certain boundaries. There are themes to suit different interests, and then there’s the behind the scenes stuff – online clubs to join, video games, stop motion films to be made in groups. It gives children with

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autism a topic to discuss with peers that is socially acceptable and of interest to others – at least some others!’

She continues: Lego therapy is now worldwide, with organisations such as ASD Aid (http://asdaid.org), run by adult fans of Lego, organising events in Australia at which thousands attend to learn how ‘to help children with autism spectrum disorders communicate and grow’. Not everyone is convinced though.

Jean Ruttenberg, of the Autism Center in Philadelphia, says Lego therapy won’t help children with more complex cases of autism. She says that LeGoff won’t include children with behaviour problems. ‘Those make up the majority of children with autism, and the ones we struggle with every day,’ Ruttenberg says.

She would like to see more extensive studies before adding it to treatments at her centre.

Lego in the workplace Back in 1995 the Lego company observed that children were starting to play differently. ‘Growing older younger’ was the term often used, and Lego felt a new strategy was needed. Finding the results of their internal sessions decidedly unimaginative, the group called in business consultants to research how building with Lego could be used to ‘tap unconscious knowledge’ and create strategy as ‘something you live as opposed to something stored away in a document’.

However, it was not until psychology graduate Robert Rasmussen was involved in 1999 that ‘the work moved into developing the process itself… to make the results reproducible and the methodology robust’. The first ‘Lego Serious Play’ facilitators were trained in 2001, and the product was made open source in 2010.

On its website, Lego Serious Play is described as ‘building landscape models with LEGO bricks, giving them meaning through storymaking, and playing-out various possible scenarios, which deepens understanding, sharpens insight, and socially “bonds” together the group who “plays” together’. In his introductory manual, Rasmussen draws on the ideas of Jean Piaget, Seymour Papert, Mike Csikszentmihalyi and more in explaining the science behind Serious Play. ‘A business or company is so much more than a building and the people in it’, Rasmussen writes. ‘The LEGO Serious Play method is a bold attempt to take the power of constructionism and apply it to the complexity of the business world… people see things they couldn’t see before.

They can manipulate it, play with it, and ask all sorts of “what if” questions by

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physically manipulating their business model.’

Lego in research The Lego Serious Play method has also found its way into psychological research.

In 2011 a two-day experiment conducted by the LEGO Learning Institute, MINDLab and Aarhus University (including UK psychologists Chris and Uta Frith) investigated the impact of collaborative behaviour on the heart and brain.

Summer-school students from 15 countries used Lego bricks to build, discuss and align their understanding of key concepts associated with leadership and social capital. The research team hypothesise that collective building processes will lead to stronger heart rate synchronisation among participants, and greater activity in the social areas of the brain.

Also getting under the skin with Serious Play is David Gauntlett (University of Westminster). ‘Making things and then reflecting on them and telling a story about them is a great way of getting people to assemble their knowledge, thoughts and feelings about something,’ Gauntlett says. ‘I’m looking at how we can use the process to explore identities. So people are asked to build a model which represents their personal identity – who they are and what they bring to the world. Then we also build influences on their identities, and explore those connections.’ Find out more at www.artlab.org.uk/lego.htm.

Again, I ask whether there is anything intrinsic about Lego in this. ‘Lego is very easy for people to put together,’ Gauntlett says, ‘and to create something which they are typically satisfied with, and which communicates numerous meanings. This is unlike drawing, or making things with modelling clay – both of which I have also asked people to do – because these activities often make people feel selfconscious, and they become overly concerned with what the thing looks like, and spend time trying to make it look acceptable, and becoming frustrated, and so on. With Lego, people can put materials together quite quickly to communicate meanings, in metaphors, so it works very well.’

Lego also lends itself to a more incidental role in psychological research, particularly with children. David Whitebread’s lab is running a number of studies related to private speech and selfregulation. ‘While the children are building something, they are constantly talking about what they are making, planning the adventures they are going to have with it, and creating imaginary

worlds of which it is part.’ And in as yet unpublished research, Miles Richardson at the University of Derby is using Lego building skill as a predictor of mathematical and spatial abilities.

But it’s not just for kids. Lego has been used in an adaptation of Piaget’s famous ‘mountains task’ for adults, finding a strong correlation between overall social acumen and the study participants’ accuracy in taking another spatial perspective, but only when the viewpoint was that of a figure, rather than a toy camera or triangle (Shelton et al., 2011).

It has revealed the ‘curse of expertise’, in a study which showed that experts at building Lego Star Wars models underestimate the time needed for a novice to do the same thing (Hinds, 1999). A study of the influence of perceived meaning on our willingness to work made use of Lego (Ariely et al., 2008). Lego even found a place in a study which found that ‘fertility cues lead committed men to devalue relationship alternatives’ (Miller & Maner, 2010).

Even the animal world doesn’t escape.

Need to uncover risk behaviour in foraging rats? Bring in the Lego (Choi & Kim, 2010). Nicky Clayton’s group always use Lego to study episodic-like memory in scrub jays: ‘I use the Lego bricks to make each ice cube tray visuospatially distinct and thus allow my birds to bury their food in different trays at district times. This allows me to assess how good they are at remembering which caches they have hidden where and when’ (see, for example, Clayton & Dickinson, 1998). And why not have octopuses get to grips with Lego (Kuba et al., 2006), to tackle the phylogenetic origins and function of play?

Perhaps most interesting, though, is research using Lego that could reveal why people value their Lego creations.

In a paper ‘The IKEA effect – when labor leads to love’, a team led by psychologist Michael Norton (2011) investigated the counter-intuitive notion that having to put effort into producing something yourself can actually increase your

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A partnership Although Lego has been around since the 1940s, it is still relatively early days for the relationship between Lego and psychology.

Those I contacted often spoke of great potential for Lego in psychology. Gina Gomez says: ‘In terms of the Lego therapy approach, I think this can help children with other psychological difficulties – social anxiety, low self-esteem, bullying, etc. It could also be used within families to help parents – perhaps fathers in particular – interact with their children in a positive way.’ Gomez reports a conversation with Anna Trolle-Terklesen from LEGO

Whether it’s Richard Wiseman (University of Hertfordshire) and his Lego visual illusions, Niall Canavan explaining sampling in psychology via Lego (see tinyurl.com/7nd6pck) or Chris Moulin (University of Leeds) and his Lego brain (see tinyurl.com/7f8ozyy), there’s no shortage of psychologists out there making use of Lego in their teaching. Others have used Lego to explore concepts of civic participation, linked to the theories of Solomon Asch and Stanley Milgram (see tinyurl.com/78al4yn), or as a medium for teaching, learning and research in the psychology of creativity (Pike, 2002).

Beyond the brick, the Lego Mindstorms kits, containing software and hardware to create small, customizable and programmable robots, seem to lend themselves to psychology. Perhaps this is not surprising given that they grew in part from research by developmental psychologist Edith Ackermann (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). ‘I have worked with the Lego groups on a regular basis since 1986,’ she tells me. When I moved from the Piaget Institute in Geneva to work with Papert at the Epistemology and Learning Group, MIT Media Lab, I was interested in “children as cyberneticians” – the genesis of their views on control and communication in humans, animals and machines – and their views on agency and intelligence in humans, animals, and machines. Bringing Lego and the LOGO programming language together was a good marriage, offering an excellent entry point to learn about how the kids themselves think about AI, smart machines, and what not.’ Psychologists now use Ackermann’s developments to teach about the scientific method (see Tom Stafford’s account of work at the University of Sheffield, at tinyurl.com/6quqrtq), and galvanic skin response (www.extremenxt.com/gsr.htm).

Education (see www.legoeducation.com) about using Lego to help vulnerable adults make decisions about their lives – building what their perfect room/house would be like, and using that as a starting point for discussing life changes. ‘I can also see Lego being used to express or discuss emotions, in a similar way to art therapy. Lego is such a creative toy that I think the opportunities to use it in psychology, education and the workplace are very large.’

Other toys do find their way into psychology. For example, William Farr and Nicola Yuill of the University of Sussex are doing fascinating work with Steve Hinske at the Institute for Pervasive Computing in Zurich, using an augmented Playmobil Knight’s Castle.

They have added a wireless networking system and radio frequency identification tags, allowing the Playmobil characters to speak or make different sounds when they are placed in different locations. The adaptations can improve understanding of and interest in the play set, and boost the level of social interaction and play with other children (Farr et al., 2012). Farr and Yuill even teamed up with Hayes Raffle, the developer of Topobo, a construction system embedded with programmable memory. In a small sample of children with autism, they found more social forms of play with the Topobo than with traditional Lego (Farr et al., 2010).

Yet such examples are few and far between, and the sense that there is

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‘something different’ about Lego persists.

Perhaps it’s simply that what is largely a personal preference for Lego based on aesthetics, simplicity and versatility became more of a cult amongst scientists (e.g. see tinyurl.com/scitweeps), which has then led to interesting partnerships.

As we have seen, there are several examples of psychologists influencing the development of Lego (see also ‘Lego in teaching’). ‘What I find attractive about Lego as a company to work with,’ says David Whitebread, ‘is that they seem genuinely interested in supporting highlevel research into play and learning, and have a strong philosophy of developing products based on rigorous research to support children’s play. They provide funding for research through quite an impressive array of projects which they either run themselves or support financially.’

There’s even a ‘senior builder’, Dave Specha, making use of his psychology degree at a Legoland Discovery Centre (see tinyurl.com/79nwprf). There’s hope for me yet!

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willingness to pay for it. Participants valued their Lego helicopters, ducks, dogs or birds more when they had built them compared to when they received prebuilt sets, or when they built and unbuilt them.

The authors suggest that ‘building products increases both thoughts about the positive attributes of that product… and positive affect and emotional attachment to that product’. In addition, the authors argue, self-assembly of products may allow people to both feel competent and display evidence of that competence – their creation – thereby ‘signalling desired attributes’ to themselves and others. Personally, I suspect that displaying my ‘creation’ would only signal to my other half that I was entering midlife crisis, but Norton’s point has solid foundations.

Lego in teaching

Jon Sutton is Managing Editor of The Psychologist.

If you have used Lego or other play systems in your professional life, do get in touch. jon.sutton@bps.org.uk

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