We are hosting the fourth Summer School on Consciousness and Metacognition in 2025. It is a series of interdisciplinary summer schools hosted by UCL in London (UK) and PSL in Paris (France). The goal of this summer school is to serve as an intensive workshop, knowledge exchange, and networking opportunity.
The school will be hosted by UCL in London on 14-16 July 2025. For more information, and to apply see this page.
Yesterday the lab had our Christmas lunch. We also said goodbye to Nadine who is leaving the MetaLab to start her own new Imagine Reality Lab. Nadine has been a central part of the MetaLab for the past 6 years, and was the driving force behind our the lab’s work on reality monitoring. Huge congratulations Nadine on becoming a PI - we will miss you, but we’re excited to see what you and your lab will get up to!
The work going on in the MetaLab was the subject of a cover story in the British Neuroscience Association’s magazine, the BNA Bulletin. Check it out below!
Congratulations to Benjy on his new Current Biology paper characterising a neural basis for non-symbolic and symbolic zero!
For more information see the Twitter thread below, or read this article covering the research in New Scientist .
Very excited to share the second preprint from my PhD – Creating something out of nothing: Symbolic and non-symbolic representations of sensory absence.
— Benjy Barnett (@benjy_barnett) January 30, 2024
In the paper, @smfleming and I set out to characterise the neural representation of the number zero in the human brain.
A 🧵! https://t.co/1Yiqa4WToY
Steve and Nick Shea have a new paper in Trends in Cognitive Sciences on how quality spaces interface with theories of consciousness.
The paper considers how localist, workspace, and higher-order theories of consciousness can accommodate claims about the qualitative character of experience and functionally support a quality space. We review existing empirical evidence for each of these positions, and highlight novel experimental tools, such as altering local activation spaces via brain stimulation or behavioural training, that can distinguish these accounts.
A Twitter thread with more details can be found below!
Delighted to share new joint work with Nicholas Shea on quality space computations for consciousness in @TrendsCognSci https://t.co/azdFKUDGxV
— Steve Fleming (@smfleming) July 17, 2024
A thread 1/N 🧵 pic.twitter.com/YYLB4hn2E0
Steve hosted a lab BBQ to say goodbye to Nan, Luna and Cristina as they all finish in the MetaLab and move on to start their PhDs.
Several lab members gave talk and poster presentations at the Association of the Scientific Study of Consciousness meeting in Tokyo and its satellite meetings.
Photos of lab members in Shinjuku and a selection of posters are included below.
Congratulations to Benjy Barnett whose latest preprint has been featured in the New Scientist magazine and on their podcast!
Fear of predators may have helped us conceptualise the idea of zero
See the full preprint here. And listen to the New Scientist episode here.
Congratulations to Benjy on his paper “Identifying content-invariant neural signatures of perceptual vividness” which is now published in PNAS Nexus
The study used data from different MEG and fMRI experiments to ask how the vividness of our perceptual experiences is encoded in the brain. We showed that there are signals in the brain that keep track of perceptual vividness independently from what is actually being perceived. This suggests there may be higher-order brain regions monitoring the reliability of our perceptual representations, and that this may contribute to our experience of vividness.
The paper is explained in more detail in Benjy’s Twitter thread.
Very pleased to see the first paper of my PhD published in @PNASNexus - with a dream team Lau Møller Andersen, @smfleming and @nadine_dijkstra!
— Benjy Barnett (@benjy_barnett) February 28, 2024
In the paper - we examined a fundamental question about how perceptual vividness is encoded in the brain🧵https://t.co/QarITrjxwH
Clara Colombatto and Sucharit Katyal have both completed their postdocs in the Metalab. Clara is starting her own lab at the University of Waterloo and Sucharit is starting an postdoc at the University of Copenhagen. We wish them all the best in their exciting new roles!
Nadine’s finding that a reality threshold distinguishes between perception and imagination was featured by Quanta Magazine as one of 2023’s biggest breakthroughs in biology and neuroscience!
Several members of the MetaLab went away to the wilds of the North Lakes in early October to learn, exchange ideas, cook, walk and generally talk science. A great time was had by all despite the sometimes windswept weather!
Steve represented the MetaLab on tour at science fesitvals in Rome (Il Festival di Salute) and Bergamo (BergamoScienza), with interviews and presentations about metacognition and self-awareness. Links to videos below (though with simultaneous translation in Italian!)
Steve has been awarded the Francis Crick Medal and Lecture by the Royal Society, “for tackling foundational questions about the neurobiology of conscious experience and advancing our understanding of the neural and computational basis of metacognition.” There will be an in-person lecture in autumn 2023 - watch this space!
I am over the moon to receive the Francis Crick Medal and Lecture from the @royalsociety - a huge honour, and an exciting recognition of consciousness science.
— Steve Fleming (@smfleming) August 30, 2023
V grateful to my generous mentors, and to lab members who have pushed boundaries I did not realise could be pushed! https://t.co/Si6bLT6f7N
Several lab members gave talk and poster presentations over the summer, at the Association of the Scientific Study of Consciousness meeting in NYC, the Computational Psychiatry conference in Dublin, and the Computational Cognitive Neuroscience conference in Oxford.
A special mention to Wiktoria Luczak who gave her first ever talk about her undergraduate thesis work (on modeling metacognitive distortions) at CCN - congratulations!
A selection of posters is included below.
Nadine has been busy giving interviews on her recent Nature Communications paper showing that subjective signal strength distinguishes reality from imagination.
Here’s a selection of links, enjoy!
UCL press release on the study
Brief article in the London Evening Standard
Excellent and clear deep dive into the study and findings in Quanta Magazine
Interview with Nadine on news talk radio show CKNW in Vancouver, Canada
Interview with Nadine in the Deutsche Welle on Science Inspired
Rebecca Keogh recently wrote a lovely Spotlight in TICS on Nadine’s paper on how subjective signal strenth distinguishes between reality and imagination.
Link to the full article is here.
I am SO excited to share that our paper 'Sensory strength distinguishes imagination from reality' is now published! It was a long process but I'm so happy with the result. With @smfleming.
— Nadine Dijkstra (@nadine_dijkstra) March 27, 2023
See below for thread, code and data 👇https://t.co/TG0Lha4o0M
Congratulations to Nadine on her paper “Subjective signal strength distinguishes reality from imagination” which is now published in Nature Communications.
The study used computer models, online experiments and brain imaging to investigate how people judge whether something is real or imaginary. We found that people were surprisingly bad at knowing whether what they saw was real, or just part of their imagination. These results suggest that, counterintuitively, there is no categorical difference between imagination and reality; instead, it is a difference in degree, not in kind.
For more details check out Nadine’s Twitter thread on the results.
A warm welcome to Nadia Hosseinizaveh who is visiting us for a few months as part of her PhD with Pascal Mamassian at ENS, Paris. Welcome Nadia!
