Steve visited to Korea to talk metacognition, AI, neuroscience, consciousness and much else in between in a symposium organised by the Korean National Academy of Sciences.
He also gave a talk at the Institute of Basic Science’s CNIR directed by old MetaLab friend Hakwan Lau, and saw the exciting cross-species imaging being developed there.
It was beautiful autumnal weather to boot. We look forward to future visits!
It was the MetaLab’s turn to host teatime at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, including Jason’s entry into the ICN Bake Off. This is our MetaLab pastry maze. The mazes contain pastel de nata and palmier obstacles to represent the many layers of our (meta)cognition. Before digging in, you have to pay a lot of attention to the location of the pastries. After everyone digs in, the start and goal locations are revealed and you need to navigate the mazes without the help of the pastries. This interactive bake-off creation turns our cognitive task into a fun pastry game!
Benjy’s paper examining differences between numerical (e.g. the number zero) and perceptual absences using MEG is now published in eLife.
We find that the human brain encodes perceptual absence and numerical absence through distinct neural codes, while replicating our previous findings that symbolic and non-symbolic forms of zero share a common representation.
Steve wrote a review for Nature Reviews Neuroscience exploring how combining results from different techniques and species can offer an integrative picture of the brain mechanisms supporting metacognition. It also includes some forays into the very fast-moving world of understanding metacognition in AI systems (not just LLMs!) and explores how metacognitive mechanisms such as reality monitoring might contribute to functional explanations of conscious experience.
An open access link to the paper is here.
Kevin O’Neill’s collaboration with former MetaLab member Wiktoria Kozyra on confidence estimates is now published in Open Mind.
The intuition is that as more dimensions are added to the stimulus space, they act to compress the effect of distractors on confidence due to normalisation. This means that confidence is more sensitive to the chosen evidence relative to unchosen evidence, which is the hallmark of the positive evidence bias.
A broader implication of our results is that, in higher dimensional spaces, confidence criteria for detection and identification become more similar, and strict dissociations between detection and discrimination performance (e.g. in blindsight and related conditions) may be a consequence of the adoption of narrower stimulus spaces.
Congratulations Wiktoria & Kevin!
As an addition to the Summer School on Consciousness and Metacognition, Steve participated in a discussion “Thinking about Thinking” with philosopher and author Acharya Prashant. They discussed how the brain reflects on itself, from both scientific and philosophical perspectives. It was introduced and chaired by Dr. Megan Peters.
We’ve just hosted another Summer School on Consciousness and Metacognition. This year the school placed a particular emphasis on new innovations in the field. Each attendee submitted their ideas for an innovation, which were then workshopped in small groups. Congratulations to Rebekka Mattes, whose innovation “By experimentally manipulating metacognitive noise, I would like to test whether metacognition constitutes a causal component of the control mechanisms underlying decision-making.” won the judge’s panel and a £1500 prize. We also had an excellent group of speakers and participants - with a keynote from Matthew Rushworth.
The MetaLab went to a comically large church on Chiswell beach for our 2026 retreat. We had some great beachy walks, some great talks, we went fossil hunting and made s’mores! And we are happy to introduce EggMan, our newest lab member.
The lab’s work on metacognition and consciousness was covered in a feature for Knowable Magazine. The magazine is produced by the Annual Reviews stable of journals, and aims to explore the real-world significance of scholarly work through a journalistic lens and report on the current state of play across a wide variety of fields.
The link is here: https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/mind/2026/science-of-self-awareness-and-decision-making
Massive congratulations to Cormac who successfully defended his PhD on Friday! Cormac joined the MetaLab as a MSc Student in 2021 and then completed his PhD studentship as part of the COMP2PSYCH program of the International Max Planck Research School. We will miss him in the lab, but are excited to see what he does next!
Sucharit Katyal’s paper disentangling different computational origins of confidence distortions in relation to anxiety and gender is now published in Psychological Medicine here
A nice writeup of these findings can be found in The Conversation
Congratulations Sucharit!
It was the MetaLab’s turn to host teatime at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, including Jason’s entry into the ICN Bake Off. This is our MetaLab Lateralized representation sponge cake. It is a layered cake, just like the multiple layers of your (meta)cognition. Filled with whipped cream and strawberry jam. It's topped with chocolate 'obstacles' to represent the mazes we ask participants to navigate. And of course, it is served one half at a time, as we study how people tend to lateralize their attention to a single hemifield while solving these mazes.
Steve participated in an entertaining and wide-ranging panel discussion on consciousness at The Francis Crick Institute as part of the "Question of Science" podcast hosted by Brian Cox, and featuring Anil Seth, Katharina Schmack and Alex O’Connor.
Richard, Christina and Steve all traveled to Egmond an Zee for the annual NVP (Dutch Society for Brain and Cognition) conference, where Steve gave one of the two keynotes https://www.societyforbrainandcognition.nl
It was a lovely meeting - high quality, friendly and festive. We hope to be back!
Yesterday we celebrated 2025 with our lab Christmas dinner. We had delicious food, a few drinks and a very fun Secret Santa. Here’s to an even better 2026!
The lab’s work on metacognition was showcased in a series of interviews with Steve as part of “Expeditions”, an initiative funded by the Leverhulme Trust to cover the research of winners of the Philip Leverhulme Prizes
We’re wishing Benjy best of luck in his new postdoctoral position in the Uncertainty Lab at Birkbeck! Benjy completed his PhD in the MetaLab in 2024, focusing on perceptual and numerical absences, before staying on as a postdoc as part of the ETHOS team. We’re sad to see him go, but excited to see what he gets up to next. Find out about Benjy’s future endeavours on his website.
We’ve just hosted another Summer School on Consciousness and Metacognition. This year’s special topic was AI. We had an excellent group of speakers and participants - with a keynote from Jonathan Birch. Thanks to all our PSL students for traveling to be with us!
The MetaLab was featured in a 3sat documentary about the frontiers of science - see from ~25 minutes in here!
Nadine’s paper on the neural basis for perceptual reality monitoring judgments is now published in Neuron.
A nice writeup of these findings can be found on the UCL website. This work was covered in New Scientist magazine, and in the New Scientist podcast (from ~8 minutes in).
Congratulations Nadine!
