Summer School On Consciousness and Metacognition 2026

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.

Knowable Magazine piece

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

Teatime at the ICN

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.

Paper on transdiagnostic underconfidence published in Nature Communications

Sucharit’s paper on how people learn to form global confidence estimates, and how this is distorted in people with higher anxiety and depression symptoms, is now published in Nature Communications. We find that systematic global underconfidence can be partly explained due to a failure to learn from instances of high local confidence - a distortion in metacognitive learning. This might have implications for explaining why people fail to correct for biases in self-perception, for instance in impostor syndrome.

Congratulations Sucharit!

The paper can be found here, and a writeup of our findings in the Danish media is here.

Steve gives Francis Crick Lecture at the Royal Society

Steve gave this year’s Francis Crick Lecture at the Royal Society in January, and was awarded the associated Medal by Sir David Baulcombe. Thanks to everyone who turned out to support or watched online!

Summer School Applications are now open

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.