Timing & Time Perception 6 (2018) 231–414 brill.com/time TRF1: It Was the Best of Time(s)… Anne Giersch1 and Jennifer T. Coull2 1INSERM, France 2Laboratoire des Neurosciences Cognitives (UMR 7291), Aix-Marseille University & CNRS, Marseille, France The Timing Research Forum (TRF; http://timingforum.org/) is an interna- tional (Fig. 1), gender-inclusive, and open academic society for timing re- search, founded in 2016 by Argiro Vatakis and Sundeep Teki (Teki, 2016). Following a call to its Committee members in May 2016, we agreed to host the 1st Conference of the Timing Research Forum in Strasbourg, France (TRF1; http://trf-strasbourg.sciencesconf.org). First on the agenda was to decide on eminent keynote speakers to lend credibility to this very first TRF conference. We wanted one talk from the field of psychology and the other from the neurosciences, and so were delighted that both Lera Boro- ditsky and Warren Meck accepted our invitations immediately. Lera kicked off the conference for us, with an extremely entertaining talk about the spatial representation of time in different societies and cultures and how the linguistic metaphors we use to describe time influence our conception of time. Warren highlighted the key role of the striatal dopaminergic sys- tem for timing, illustrating his talk with data from an impressive variety of methodological techniques from the clinical level (performance in patients with Parkinson’s Disease) right down to the cellular (optogenetic studies in mice). Coincidentally, the role of dopamine in timing was also the subject of our third keynote talk. One of the mission statements of TRF is to pro- mote the work of young researchers, and Argiro and Sundeep had the great idea to invite an early-career researcher to give a keynote talk. The TRF committee members were invited to submit recommendations of key tim- ing papers published in 2016, and Sofia Soares was the unanimous choice to present her PhD work with Joseph Paton on the timing functions of mid- brain dopamine neurons, published in Science (Soares et al., 2016). She © Timing Research Forum, 2018 DOI: 10.1163/22134468-00603001 This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the prevailing CC-BY license at the time of publication. Downloaded from Brill.com10/10/2021 06:49:40AM via free access 232 Timing & Time Perception 6 (2018) 231–414 Argentina, Australia, China, Belgium, Colombia, Brazil, Croatia, cyprus, Czech Republic, Canada, Denmark, USA, Estonia, Finland, Ukraine, France, Germany, UK, Greece, India, Hungary, Turkey, Taiwan, Iran, Switzerland, Sweden, Italy, 18 Ireland, 3 Spain, Israel, 8 South Africa, Italy, Scotland, London, Singapore, New Russia, Mexico, Japan, Zealand, Portugal, Poland, Netherlands, Peru, Figure 1. The TRF membership across the world as of October 2017. delivered an incredibly assured talk, demonstrating that the activity of dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra, though not of those in the ventral tegmental area, causally reflects and controls time-based judgments. We knew TRF had a large membership with more than 650 members and that the timing community was growing. But for a specialized confer- ence, we judged three days of single-track sessions would be sufficient. We therefore planned and announced the dates (October 23–25, 2017) ac- cordingly. However, the incredible response to our call for abstracts (>200 submissions) meant that we had far more abstracts than time available. We therefore had to make the difficult decision to program parallel sessions. Some tough scheduling choices would have to be made! We were partic- ularly overwhelmed by the excellent quality of submissions for symposia and wish we could have accepted them all. In the end, we chose a balanced selection of neuroscientific, psychological and computational symposia that spanned timing from the milliseconds range right up to circadian rhythms (see Fig. 2). The 15 symposia (encompassing 52 individual talks, 35% female presenters) covered a wide spectrum of timing phenomena: how duration is processed (e.g., spatial, motor or embodied representations Downloaded from Brill.com10/10/2021 06:49:40AM via free access Timing & Time Perception 6 (2018) 231–414 233 % % Females Males Not reported % Figure 2. Frequency of time scales associated with TRF1 abstract submissions. of time; scalar properties of time) and how it can be used for learning or making predictions, how the order of events in time impacts our conscious experience (e.g., intentional binding; the continuous nature of conscious- ness), and how sensory and neural rhythms guide our sense of time in both humans and animals. Actually, very similar themes were reflected in the submissions for short oral presentations. And once the selected abstracts (36 talks, 42% female presenters) had been organized into seven themed sessions, the high quality of the presentations made each session actually feel like a premeditated symposium! We also had a large number of posters (120 posters, 53% female pre- senters), which were presented in the beautiful main hall of Strasbourg’s UNESCO heritage University Palace over two days. The hall was also the location for the lunch breaks, meaning researchers could gather together and discuss the displayed posters outside of the designated poster sessions. Posters covered an even more diverse range of topics than the talks or sym- posia. On the first day, we had posters describing how the perception of duration can be modulated by a variety of distinct factors (memory, emo- tion, motivation, meditation, cognitive effort, salience, visual character- istics, magnitude) and how it is impaired in a number of psychiatric and neurological disorders (e.g., focal lesions, dementia, Parkinson’s Disease, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, ADHD, autism). On the second day, we had neuroscientific investigations of duration processing encom- passing several different methodological techniques (electrophysiology, neuroimaging, lesions, pharmacology) and a large number of posters on rhythm processing and temporal predictions. This session also included Downloaded from Brill.com10/10/2021 06:49:40AM via free access 234 Timing & Time Perception 6 (2018) 231–414 0 -ms ms-secs secs-mins mins-hours hours-days Figure 3. A word cloud featuring keywords from all abstracts presented at TRF1 where the size of a keyword is proportional to its frequency of occurrence across all submissions. posters on computational models of timing and the role of time percep- tion in computer science and robotics. Finally, we had several posters on multisensory timing, the processing of order and intentional binding. The variety of topics meant there was something for everyone (see Fig. 3), as well as providing the opportunity to discover new ways in which timing can be seen to play a fundamental role in behaviour. Eleven highly rated posters were selected for the poster blitz session, in which junior researchers gave a five-minute talk to publicise their work. TRF fosters an open research community, evidenced by their collabora- tion with the Open Science Foundation to host electronic versions of the posters and talks presented at the conference (http://osf.io/view/trf2017). To date, more than 100 submissions have been shared openly with the wider scientific community, demonstrating the commitment of TRF and its members to open science and open access. Additionally, TRF has built a very active online social media presence on Twitter, Facebook, and Re- searchGate (more than 1000 followers) and the power of these networks was leveraged before and during the conference to engage with the partici- pants and the wider timing research community. A series of Q&A interview columns featuring distinguished speakers at the TRF1 conference has been openly shared, highlighting the thoughts and opinions of leading scientists Downloaded from Brill.com10/10/2021 06:49:40AM via free access Timing & Time Perception 6 (2018) 231–414 235 Figure 4. TRF1 participants came to Strasbourg from across the globe. The vast majority (~70%) were from Europe with, unsurprisingly, the largest proportion (30%) being from the host country France. Other well-represented countries included the UK (11%), Germany (8%), USA (7%), Italy (6%), the Netherlands (5%), Japan (5%) and Brazil (4%). on the current state of timing research as well as advice for early-career researchers. We would like to finish by thanking Argiro and Sundeep, gratefully acknowledging their generosity and dedication in setting up TRF from scratch. Without them, we would not have had the platform that allowed us to bring together 270 people from 28 different countries and five conti- nents (Fig. 4), to describe such diverse aspects of timing research. Thanks to both Sundeep and Argiro for providing a virtual home for the timing research community. But even more importantly, we would like to thank all of the participants for their support and enthusiasm for TRF1. The impres- sive quality and quantity of the presentations (see this issue), and the stim- ulating and positive atmosphere during the conference itself, exceeded all our expectations. The huge success of this very first TRF conference attests to the undeniable need for a regular meeting for our international timing community. References Soares, S., Atallah, B. V., & Paton, J. J. (2016). Midbrain dopamine neurons control judg- ment of time. Science, 354, 1273–1277. Teki, S. (2016). A citation-based analysis and review of significant