MSense Lab
We study how the mind makes sense of time, space, and uncertainty
Research in perception, attention, and Bayesian cognition — explained for everyone.
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Attention & context
Familiar environments help the brain focus on what matters and ignore what doesn't. Our research explores how spatial regularities, contextual cueing, and cross-modal signals shape selective attention in complex scenes.
Attention Guidance, Context Learning and Suppression

Bayesian inference
Perception is not passive; the brain constantly combines prior knowledge with new sensory evidence to form beliefs about the world. Our work examines prediction errors, prior updating, and computational models of this inferential process.
Perception as Bayesian inference

Time perception
How does the brain construct the experience of time and why does it sometimes get it wrong? Our research investigates sequential dependencies, context effects, timing models, and the neural signatures of temporal processing across seconds to minutes.
Time Perception
Curious Minds — latest
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Time perception
Where the last interval lingers: the putamen and duration serial dependence
Si Cheng’s fMRI study in NeuroImage: Reports finds that the previous interval lingers in the putamen, not visual cortex, when people reproduce durations, …
Oct 2026

Time perception
The Attentional Thief: Why an Hour of Scrolling Feels Like Half
In a stripped-down lab feed with EEG and eye tracking, a 60-second block of self-paced scrolling felt like 28 seconds, shorter than watching the same images …
Jun 2026

Time perception
Your phone steals time twice
Featured on 3sat nano, our preliminary results show that actively browsing short videos shrinks felt time far more than passively watching them, and that …
Mar 2026
From the lab — latest
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Research
Where the last interval lingers: the putamen and duration serial dependence
Si Cheng’s fMRI study in NeuroImage: Reports finds that the previous interval lingers in the putamen, not visual cortex, when people reproduce durations, …
Oct 2026

Research
Distinct hippocampus codes for contextual cueing
Siyi Chen’s brain-imaging study in NeuroImage shows the anterior hippocampus encoding links between a repeated context and the target, the posterior …
Jan 2026

Research
Domain-specific vs domain-general prediction errors
Plank and colleagues find in Imaging Neuroscience that adults with ASD, ADHD and neurotypical controls show no differences in prediction-error signals for the …
Oct 2025

Where the last interval lingers: the putamen and duration serial dependence
Si Cheng’s fMRI study in NeuroImage: Reports finds that the previous interval lingers in the putamen, not visual cortex, when people reproduce durations, and that task switching recruits …
Lab news · Oct 2026

The Attentional Thief: Why an Hour of Scrolling Feels Like Half
In a stripped-down lab feed with EEG and eye tracking, a 60-second block of self-paced scrolling felt like 28 seconds, shorter than watching the same images replayed, yet memory for them was no …
Lab news · Jun 2026

Talk at MPI Tübingen: One Process, Two Biases
On 27 March 2026 Zhuanghua Shi spoke at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, hosted by Prof. Li Zhaoping, arguing that the Vierordt effect and serial dependence stem from …
Lab news · Mar 2026