About the Timing Research Forum

Timing Research Forum (TRF) is an open academic society for promoting multidisciplinary research on timing and time perception. Established in 2016 by Sundeep Teki and Argiro Vatakis, the aim of TRF is to bring together researchers with an interest in understanding time on a single platform and encourage open science and collaboration amongst its membership through organizing conferences, and sharing relevant information and resources.

This blog post was written by three members of the TRF:

Prof Virginie van Wassenhove, Université Paris-Saclay

Dr Argiro Vatakis, Panteion University

Dr Fuat Balci, Koç University

What did you do using Gorilla?

We used Gorilla to create the Blursday database. The COVID-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns triggered worldwide changes in the daily routines of human experience. The Blursday database provides repeated measures of subjective time and related processes from participants in nine countries tested on 14 questionnaires and 15 behavioural tasks during the COVID-19 pandemic. A total of 2,840 participants completed at least one task, and 439 participants completed all tasks in the first session.

The database and all data collection tools realised with Gorilla are accessible to researchers for studying the effects of social isolation on temporal information processing, time perspective, decision-making, sleep, metacognition, attention, memory, self-perception and mindfulness. Blursday includes quantitative statistics such as sleep patterns, personality traits, psychological well-being and lockdown indices.

The database provides quantitative insights on the effects of lockdown (stringency and mobility) and subjective confinement on time perception (duration, passage of time and temporal distances). Perceived isolation affects time perception, and we report an inter-individual central tendency effect in retrospective duration estimation.

Has this study been published?

You can read the published study here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022–01419‑2.

Find the study protocol here: https://osf.io/359qm/.

And find all the tasks and questionnaires on Gorilla Open Materials here:

English (https://app.gorilla.sc/openmaterials/278377)

French (https://app.gorilla.sc/openmaterials/27809)

Greek (https://app.gorilla.sc/openmaterials/281196)

Turkish (https://app.gorilla.sc/openmaterials/286114)

Japanese (https://app.gorilla.sc/openmaterials/286482)

How did Gorilla make your life or research better, easier or faster?

Easy sharing with collaborators, ease of distribution to potential participants, ease of progress tracking in terms of participant recruitment.

How did you arrive at the decision to take your research online with Gorilla?

We were looking for an easy way to code and implement very fast numerous tasks and questionnaires that colleagues could easily share and replicate.

Gorilla was available in both GUI and coding interfaces. It was modular and easy to implement. The clone feature enabled fast sharing. The selective sharing feature enabled proper collaborative work.

What were your concerns about taking your research online?

We had timing concerns but this study (https://peerj.com/articles/9414/) was very helpful in documenting most concerns we had.

What is the most exciting piece of work or research you’ve ever done?

Virginie: I am very excited about this recent work: Spontaneous α Brain Dynamics Track the Episodic “When”.

Argiro: A number of experiments (under review or to be published) under the EU project https://chronopilot.eu/.

Fuat: The doll house for my daughter and then
https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.0812709106.

What do you believe to be true that you cannot prove (yet)?

Virginie: Free will is real.

Fuat: Free will is unreal!

What real-world problem do you see that your research could impact?

Virginie: I would like our next big study to be about how one’s faulty ability to imagine the future alters one’ decision-making in the present.

Fuat: Rescuing symptoms of neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental disorders by fixing the disrupted internal clock.

What is the biggest advantage of online research methods?

Inclusion, large-scale collaboration, putting lab psychology to the test.