Congratulations to Max who successfully defended his PhD, making him the first PhD graduate from the MetaLab! Thank you also to Tali Sharot and Redmond O’Connell for being superb examiners. We sadly could not convene for an official post-viva celebration in person but got by with a combination of Zoom and socially distanced beers at the Queens Larder!
Dan Bang’s paper entitled “Private-public mappings in human prefrontal cortex” has been published recently in eLife. Dan used confidence estimation as a model system to ask how private (“what I feel”) and public (“what I say”) aspects of mental states are separately encoded, and how different subregions of prefrontal cortex may control these private-public mappings. We think that this process is important for flexible social behaviour, and a Twitter thread summarising our findings is below. This is the first paper from Dan’s Sir Henry Wellcome Fellowship focusing on the neurobiological basis of social behaviour. Congratulations Dan!
The dynamo that is @Dan_Bang is at it again- his study of private-public mappings is now out in @eLife, together with @hamed_nili and @SaraErshad. We study how the brain maps private mental states (“what I feel”) to public actions (“what I say”) Thread here👇 https://t.co/Sls2OZTISh
— Steve Fleming (@smfleming) July 24, 2020
MetaLab and Max Planck Centre PhD student Max Rollwage has been awarded one of the 2020 Jon Driver Prizes, awarded to outstanding young neuroscientists at UCL. He was given the award at the UCL Neuroscience Symposium held last week. Many congratulations to Max!
Jon Driver (1962 - 2011) was a highly influential cognitive neuroscientist whose work had a major impact world-wide, and who played a leading role in the neuroscience community at UCL. This award is particularly poignant as Steve, Max’s PhD supervisor, was mentored by Jon when he himself was a PhD student. Jon was also a great friend of Ray Dolan, Max’s second supervisor. Many of these personal memories are collected here: http://jondriver1962-2011.blogspot.com/
Max Rollwage’s paper entitled “Confidence drives a neural confirmation bias” has been published recently in Nature Communications. Max quantified how confidence in a decision alters MEG signatures of subsequent evidence accumulation, and how such alterations might underpin a confirmation bias in decision-making. A Twitter thread summarising our findings is below, and UCL’s press release can be found here. Congratulations Max!
MetaLab PhD student @M_Rollwage's paper is out today in @NatureComms, in collaboration with @AlisaLoosen, @TobiasUHauser, @moran_rani & Ray Dolan. We were interested in how people process new information, and how confidence affects this. Thread 1/N
— Steve Fleming (@smfleming) May 26, 2020
Matan Mazor’s paper entitled “Distinct neural contributions for detecting, but not discriminating, visual stimuli” has been published in eLife - congratulations Matan!
A Twitter thread explaining the key findings can be found below:
New preprint from @mazormatan, Karl Friston and me: Distinct neural contributions to metacognition for detecting (but not discriminating) visual stimuli https://t.co/hFQOFbfIdy 1/N
— Steve Fleming (@smfleming) November 26, 2019
Andrew, Elisa and Steve have been involved with the Dear World Project, a cross-disciplinary public engagement collaboration that pairs artists and scientists to explore mental health. Their artwork, created by Nicole Morris, Tom Berry and Cathryn Shilling, was displayed in an exhibition as part of a wider collaboration with the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging and Max Plank Centre for Computational Psychiatry.
Nadine Dijkstra has received two prestigious postdoctoral fellowships to support her work on perceptual awareness and reality monitoring in the lab - a Rubicon Fellowship from the NWO and a Marie Curie Fellowship from the EU. Congratulations Nadine!
A big welcome to new lab members Nadine Dijkstra, Nadim Atiya and Oliver Warrington!
See the people page for more about them and their research plans.
Last year’s MetaLab Masters student Lion Schulz has been awarded the “Best student of the year award” for achieving the highest overall academic performance in UCL’s Cognitive and Decision Sciences MSc. Congratulations to Lion and his supervisor Max!
Steve and Matan were interviewed about consciousness for The Why Factor on the BBC World Service.
There are two programmes - in the first we discuss “Why are we conscious of so little?”, and in the second, “What is the point of consciousness?”
Links below, enjoy!
MetaLab Masters student Roy Tal has been awarded the 2019 Richard Frackowiak MSc Prize for the highest scoring student on UCL’s MSc Brain and Mind Sciences. Congratulations to Roy and his supervisor Matan!
Seeing Culture in Our Brain was given an honorable mention in SFN’s 2019 Brain Awareness Video Contest. Congratulations Keer!
Steve was interviewed by CUNY philosopher Richard Brown for his great YouTube series Consciousness Live - very much unscripted and lots of fun! Amongst other things we talked about science writing, metacognition, generative models, consciousness and the prefrontal cortex.
The MetaLab: http://metacoglab.org
We are sad to say goodbye to Marion Rouault who is leaving the lab to take up a new position at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. Marion was one of the founding members of the MetaLab, and had a fantastically productive few years here in London - we will greatly miss having her around, and wish her all the best for her next steps!
We had a lab picnic on a lovely spring evening on Primrose Hill to give Marion a fitting send off:
MetaLab Masters student Lion Schulz will take up a PhD position with Peter Dayan at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in September. Congratulations to Lion!
Xiao’s paper on a role for metacognition in cognitive offloading to the environment has now been published in Cognition. A Twitter thread summarising the findings can be found here:
New @wellcometrust funded work from the lab in Cognition – @xiaohupsy asked how metacognitive evaluations guide whether to “offload” cognition to the external environment @WCHN_UCL @MPC_CompPsych #openaccess paper here https://t.co/memgwXucnQ thread below 1/10
— Steve Fleming (@smfleming) July 8, 2019
Matan has been awarded a prestigious UCL Bogue Fellowship to study how self-models of attention and perception form and develop over infancy and childhood and to characterise these models in adults. Matan plans to use this award to fund a visit to Josh Tenenbaum's lab at MIT for 3 months later this year. Congratulations to Matan!
Congratulations to Steve who has been awarded the 2019 Spearman Medal, the premier early career award from the British Psychological Society!
Read more about the award here
Marion’s paper entitled “Forming global estimates of self-performance from local confidence” has been published in Nature Communications.
A blog post by Marion summarizing the findings is here.
In the paper we developed a new paradigm to investigate how external feedback and local decision confidence relate to global self-performance estimates (SPEs) , and whether local fluctuations in decision confidence inform SPEs when external feedback is unavailable. We showed that fluctuations in confidence contribute to global SPEs over and above effects of objective performance and reaction times. Surprisingly, we found that humans tend to underestimate their performance in the absence of feedback, compared with a condition with full feedback, despite objective performance being similar in the two cases. We hope that study of global self-beliefs formation will advance our understanding of self-efficacy distortion in psychiatric disorders.
Max’s paper entitled "Metacognitive Failure as a Feature of Those Holding Radical Beliefs" has been published in Current Biology.
Figure 4. Individual differences in radicalism are captured by a choice bias model.
We found that radical participants (as measured by scores on dogmatism and authoritarianism questionnaires) showed reduced insight into the correctness of their choices and less sensitivity to post-decision evidence, indicating a generic resistance to revising mistakes. The effect sizes were small, but robust and replicable in a second independent dataset. Given that the tasks were far removed from real-world issues we think it’s striking that basic difference in metacognition predict answers to questions indicative of radical beliefs. A blogpost unpacking these findings further can be found here.