home page for Kielan Yarrow

Dr Kielan Yarrow

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Kielan as a post-doc, looking happy
 Kielan sketched at a conference, looking worried Kielan on his stag do, looking stupid

I work as a senior lecturer at the Department of Psychology, City University.

My office is in the social sciences building room D510. You can contact me by phone on 020 70408530 (internal x 8530) or (preferably) email kielan.yarrow.1 "at" city.ac.uk


  1. Teaching & supervision
  2. Research interests
  3. Research methods
  4. Recent publications
    5.

Undergraduate & postgraduate teaching (2011/12):

My office hours are currently Mondays 12-1, Thursdays 11-12 and Fridays 2-3. I will be supervising third-year BSc projects (slots as scheduled on the new timetable by arrangement, although I am flexible about days/times), arranging supervision for MSc Research Methods & Psychology summer projects (via PSM500 Preliminary Research proposal, term 2) and teaching on the following courses:

Postgraduate supervision:

I currently supervise three (and a half) PhD students: Stergios Makris, Aviad Hadar, Marta Narkiewicz and Anna Lambrechts (co-supervised with Seb Gaigg). Stergios is (nearly finished) looking at the Gibsonian notion of "affordances" (the automatic activation of motor plans during object perception); Aviad is interested in motor activation in situations of response conflict, particularly deception; both Marta and Anna are looking at various aspects of temporal interval perception.

I welcome informal enquiries from potential PhD students. The psychology department may be funding one or two PhD places to start in September 2012, in addition to City's central studentship competition.

Research interests:


Sensorimotor decision making

Where and how do sensorimotor decisions get made? Cognitive psychology started out by viewing the mind like a programme running on a digital computer, with mental operations (like perceiving, deciding, and acting) happening one after another in series. However, the brain is a parallel processor, not a serial device. This raises questions about the potential for parallel motor planning, and the role of multiple brain regions in representing sensorimotor decisions as they evolve over time. My group have been looking at the way perceptual and decision processes seem to leak into the motor system, such that plans for action exist even when we have no conscious intention to act. In our experiments, we often assess motor plans by stimulating the motor cortex to evoke specific muscular responses that are tied to action preparation. These responses index plans for action, and can even reveal response tendencies we would like to keep hidden, such as when we veto an automatic response in order to lie. This work has been taken forward by my PhD students Stergios Makris and Aviad Hadar.

.....
multisensory time

Consider an exploding truck (well, why not?) Different sensory features (e.g. the truck’s colour, the motion of its various bits, and the sound of the explosion) are analysed in separate areas of the brain, which become activated at slightly different times. This seems at odds with our experience of a unitary sequence of events in time. To support temporal perception, the brain must compute both how long the truck was stalled (an interval) and when it exploded (an instant). Instants and intervals form a seamless and coherent perception of ongoing time, but the neural and computational basis of these perceptual experiences is not yet clear. I have studied how information from different modalities is combined when we decide about the timing of events (like exactly when the the truck exploded) and have current projects investigating various aspects of our multisensory temporal experience, including the way temporal perception can adapt to recent sensory and motor experiences. Some of this work is being carried out in collaboration with Derek Arnold (University of Queensland, Brisbane), Catherine Jones (Institute of Education, London) and Giacomo Koch (Fondazione Santa Lucia IRCCS, Rome).

.....
stopped clock

The chronostasis illusion was the major focus of my PhD and post-doctoral research. The term chronostasis describes an overestimation of the duration of a stimulus perceived following a movement. For example, in saccadic chronostasis, an object fixated following a saccade (a very rapid eye movement) is typically judged to have been seen for longer than is actually the case. This effect is most commonly experienced as the stopped clock illusion (the momentary impression that a clock has stopped when we first glance at it). The illusion is an interesting example of the way in which the brain constructs a coherent conscious visual experience when the temporal sequencing of events is made ambiguous by movement. Much of this work has been completed in collaboration with John Rothwell (ION, UCL) and Patrick Haggard (ICN, UCL).

.....
the basal ganglia

The basal ganglia are a group of subcortical nuclei that are involved in the generation of movements. Parkinson's disease is thought to result from a dysfunction of the basal ganglia. When Parkinsonian patients undergo surgery for the relief of their symptoms via deep brain stimulation, a window of opportunity exists to record from the targeted subcortical structures. I have collaborated with both Peter Brown at the Institute of Neurology and Andrea Kühn at the Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin, helping to design and programme tasks used with these patients to investigate the functions of the basal ganglia.

.....
a force platform

My earliest research projects investigated the human movement and balance systems. In one study I investigated a rare neurological condition called primary orthostatic tremor. Patients with this condition are unable to stand still for more than a few moments before beginning to shake with a distinctive high frequency tremor. We used a force platform to offer a new way to diagnose sufferers. This work was carried out with Adolfo Bronstein, now at Imperial College.

.....
The mind

I also have broader interests in a number of areas of cognitive science. For example, I have been involved with projects looking at whether tactile events can yield auditory experiences, how the coordination of the fingers during complex tasks is made tractable, and what role the pre-frontal and parietal cortices play in generating shifts of visual attention and preparing motor acts.


Research methods:


Cognitive Neuroscience

I have conducted studies with both healthy participants and neurological patients, and been an author on publications using a variety of neuroscientific methods, including behavioural and psychophysical techniques, occulography, electromyography (EMG), electroencephalography (EEG), intracranial recordings of local field potentials (LFPs), mathematical modelling, and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). At City, I am a member of the cognitive neuroscience research unit, and am responsible for the TMS lab.


My (reasonably) current H-Index is 13, with a mean average of 21 citations per paper. My publications and papers in press are shown below:-

  • Hadar, A.A., Makris, S., & Yarrow, K. The truth-telling motor cortex: Response competition in M1 discloses deceptive behaviour. Biological Psychology, 89, 495-502 (2012).
  • Brücke, C., Huebl, J., Schönecker, T., Neumann, W., Yarrow, K., Kupsch, A., Blahak, C., Lütjens, G., Brown, P., Krauss, J.K., Schneider, G., & Kühn, A.A. Scaling of movement is related to pallidal gamma oscillations in patients with dystonia. Journal of Neuroscience, 32, 1008-19 (2012).
  • Yarrow, K., Jahn, N., Durant, S., & Arnold, D.H. Shifts of criteria or neural timing? The assumptions underlying timing perception studies. Consciousness & Cognition, 20, 1518-31 (2011).
  • Makris, S., Hadar, A., & Yarrow, K. Viewing objects and planning actions: On the potentiation of grasping behaviours by visual objects. Brain & Cognition, 77, 257-264 (2011).
  • Yarrow, K., Roseboom, W. & Arnold, D.H. Spatial grouping resolves ambiguity to drive temporal recalibration. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance, 37, 1657-61 (2011).
  • Huebl, J., Schoenecker, T., Siegert, S., Brücke, C., Schneider, G., Kupsch, A., Yarrow, K. & Kühn, A.A. Modulation of subthalamic alpha activity to emotional stimuli correlates with depressive symptoms in PD. Movement Disorders, 26, 477-83 (2011).
  • Arnold, D.H. & Yarrow, K. Temporal recalibration of vision. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 278, 535-538 (2011).
  • Yarrow, K. Continuity of subjective temporal experience across eye movements: Temporal antedating following small, large and sequential saccades. In N. Srinivasan, B. R. Kar and J. Pandey (Eds.) Advances in Cognitive Science: Volume 2. New Delhi: Sage (2010).
  • Yarrow, K. Temporal dilation: The chronostasis illusion and spatial attention. In A. C. Nobre and J Coull (Eds.) Attention and Time. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2010).
  • Yarrow, K., Haggard, P. & Rothwell, J.C. Saccadic chronostasis and the continuity of subjective temporal experience across eye movements. In R. Nijhawan & B. Khurana (Eds.) Space and time in Perception and action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2010).
  • Ley, I., Haggard, P. & Yarrow, K. Optimal integration of auditory and vibrotactile information for judgments of temporal order. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance, 35, 1005-1019 (2009).
  • Yarrow, K., Brown, P. & Krakauer, J.W. Inside the brain of an elite athlete: the neural processes that support high achievement in sports Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 10, 585-596 (2009).
    • There's been some press interest in this work, for example this radio discussion (MP3 format; from KPCC radio, November 2010).
    • This review has been featured as part of a nature podcast (MP3 format; from July 2009, with my bit starting at 06:41).
  • Sauleau, P., Eusebio, A., Thevathasan, W., Yarrow, K., Pogosyan, A., Zrinzo, L., Ashkan, K., Aziz, T., Vandenberghe, W., Nuttin, B., & Brown, P. Involvement of the Subthalamic Nucleus in engagement with behaviourally relevant stimuli. European Journal of Neuroscience, 29, 931-42 (2009).
  • Yarrow, K., Haggard, P. & Rothwell, J.C. Vibrotactile-auditory interactions are post-perceptual. Perception, 37, 1114-1130 (2008).
  • Brücke, C., Kempf, F., Kupsch, A., Schneider. G., Krauss, J.K., Aziz, T., Yarrow, K., Pogosyan, A., Brown, P., & Kühn, A.A. Movement-related synchronisation of gamma activity is lateralized in patients with dystonia. European Journal of Neuroscience, 27, 2322-9 (2008).
  • Brücke, C., Kupsch, A., Schneider, G.H., Hariz, M.I., Nuttin, B., Kopp, U., Kempf, F., Trottenberg, T., Doyle, L., Chen, C.C., Yarrow, K., Brown, P., & Kühn, A.A. The subthalamic region is activated during valence-related emotional processing in patients with Parkinson's disease. European Journal of Neuroscience, 26, 767-74 (2007).
  • Androulidakis, A.G., Doyle, L.M., Yarrow, K., Litvak, V., Gilbertson, TP, & Brown P. Anticipatory changes in beta synchrony in the human corticospinal system and associated improvements in task performance. European Journal of Neuroscience, 25, 3758-65 (2007).
  • Rounis, E., Yarrow, K. & Rothwell, J.C. Effects of rTMS conditioning over the fronto-parietal network on motor versus visual attention. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 19, 513-524 (2007).
  • Brown, P., Chen, C.C., Wang, S., Kühn, A.,Doyle, L., Yarrow, K., Nuttin, B., Stein, J. & Aziz, T. Involvement of Human Basal Ganglia in Off-Line Feed-Back Control of Voluntary Movement. Current Biology, 16, 2129-34 (2006).
  • Yarrow, K., Whiteley, L., Haggard, P. & Rothwell, J.C. Biases in the perceived timing of perisaccadic visual and motor events. Perception and Psychophysics, 68, 1217-26 (2006).
  • Kühn, A.A., Doyle, L., Pogosyan, A., Yarrow, K., Kupsch, A., Schneider, G., Hariz, M.I., Trottenberg, T. & Brown, P. Modulation of beta oscillations in the subthalamic area during motor imagery in Parkinson's disease. Brain, 129, 695-706 (2006).
  • Yarrow, K., Whiteley, L., Rothwell, J.C. & Haggard, P. Spatial consequences of bridging the saccadic gap. Vision Research, 46, 545-555 (2006).
  • Kühn, A.A., Hariz, M., Silberstein, P., Tisch, S., Kupsch, A., Schneider, G., Limousin-Dowsey, P., Yarrow, K. & Brown, P. Activation of the subthalamic region during emotional processing in Parkinson’s disease. Neurology, 65, 707-713 (2005).
  • Doyle, L.M.F., Yarrow, K. & Brown, P. Lateralization of event-related beta desynchronization in the EEG during pre-cued reaction time tasks. Clinical Neurophysiology, 116, 1879-1888 (2005).
  • Yarrow, K., Johnson, H., Haggard, P. & Rothwell, J.C. Consistent chronostasis effects across saccade categories imply a subcortical efferent trigger. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 16, 839-847 (2004).
  • Yarrow, K., Haggard, P. & Rothwell, J. C. E. Action, arousal, and subjective time. Consciousness and Cognition, 13, 373-390 (2004).
  • Kühn, A.A., Williams, D., Kupsch, A., Dowsey-Limousin, P., Hariz, M., Schneider, G.H., Yarrow, K., & Brown, P. Event related beta desynchronization in human subthalamic nucleus correlates with motor performance. Brain, 127, 735-746 (2004).
  • Williams, D., Kühn, A., Kupsch, A., Tijssen, M., van Bruggen, G., Speelman, H., Hotton, G., Yarrow, K., & Brown, P. Behavioural cues are associated with modulations of synchronous oscillations in the human subthalamic nucleus. Brain, 126, 1975-1985 (2003).
  • Yarrow, K. & Rothwell, J.C. Manual chronostasis: Tactile perception precedes physical contact. Current Biology, 13, 1134-1139 (2003).
  • Latash, M.L., Yarrow, K. & Rothwell, J.C. Changes in finger coordination and responses to single pulse TMS of motor cortex during practice of a multifinger force production task. Experimental Brain Research, 151, 60-71 (2003).
  • Yarrow, K., Haggard, P., Heal, R., Brown, P. & Rothwell, J.C. Illusory perceptions of space and time preserve cross-saccadic perceptual continuity. Nature, 414, 302-305 (2001).
    • This paper received some press interest, for example this interview (MP3 format) on the Canadian science radio show Quirks and Quarks (from 17th November 2001).
  • Yarrow, K., Brown, P., Gresty, M.A. & Bronstein, A.M. Force platform recordings in the diagnosis of primary orthostatic tremor. Gait & Posture, 13, 27-34 (2001).
    • An erratum relating to the published version of this article appeared subsequently in Gait & Posture, 14, 279 (2001).
  • Guerraz, M., Shaollo-Hoffmann, J., Yarrow, K., Thilo, K.V., Bronstein, A.M. & Gresty, M.A. Visual control of postural orientation and equilibrium in congenital nystagmus. Investigative Ophthalmology & Visual Science, 41, 3798-3804 (2000).
  • Jauregui-Renaud, K., Yarrow, K., Oliver, T., Gresty, M.A. & Bronstein, A.M. Effects of caloric stimulation on respiratory frequency and heart rate and blood pressure variability. Brain Research Bulletin, 53, 17-23 (2000).
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Click here for Kielan's full academic CV.

Andrea, you can find the two new experiments here and here. The update of the picture programme is here. Also, the new version of the rotate programme is here.

Peter, you can find the latest version of the movement experiment here.

Catherine & Giacomo, you can find the time experiment here. Before it will run, you will need to get a zip file, unpack it and run the setup.exe to install some necessary files on you machine. I've had to remove the link to this due to problems with the host site's bandwidth, so contact me if you need it again.

Last updated 17/02/2012

Page created by Kielan Yarrow © 2001. Have a nice day.