The College of Humanities and Social Sciences is pleased to announce that Martin Wiener, associate professor in the Department of Psychology, has received a multi-year award for $734,430 from the National Science Foundation for the study “CRCNS US-Israel Research Proposal: NSF-BSF: The Perception of Time and Memorability in the Visual Hierarchy." The project aims to explore how the brain processes time when looking at images, with important implications for understanding memory, learning, and visual perception.
Wiener is collaborating with Ayelet Landau, Associate Professor, Cognitive Science and Psychology, Hebrew University, and Yuval Benjamini, Associate Professor, Statistics and Data Science, Hebrew University. The research team will conduct experiments using brain imaging, eye tracking, and computer modeling to understand how this process works across different parts of the visual system.
This work could lead to better treatments for conditions like Alzheimer's disease, autism, and schizophrenia, where both time perception and visual memory are disrupted. The project will also advance artificial intelligence by creating new computer models that process images more like humans do, incorporating time as a feature that current AI systems ignore. The researchers intend to develop a public database of images with time perception information that can train AI systems to predict how long visual scenes will be remembered by humans, potentially improving a wide range of AI tools, including educational software that adapts to how students process visual information.
September 30, 2025