Nadine's research covered in the New York Times
Nadine’s latest research on perceptual reality monitoring was covered in a New York Times article by David Brooks: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/02/opinion/brain-reality-imagination.html
Steve interviewed by Ginger Campbell on the BrainScience podcast
Another fun interview about metacognition and Know Thyself, this time with Ginger Campbell on her brilliant BrainScience podcast
Steve interviewed about metacognition on BrainInspired
Steve had another fun discussion with Paul Middlebrooks on his BrainInspired podcast - this time all about metacognition and his recent book, Know Thyself
Welcome to Benjy, Cormac and Marco!
This summer we had a few new people starting in the lab. Benjy Barnett is starting his PhD with us as part of the Leverhulme Ecological Brain DTP. Cormac Dickson is starting his PhD on the IMPRS COMP2PSYCH programme, after completing his Masters thesis in the lab. And Marco Wittmann is joining us as a postdoc from the University of Oxford, where he was working with Matthew Rushworth.
Welcome to all!
New paper by Nadim Atiya in PLoS Computational Biology
In a new theoretical paper led by Nadim Atiya, we use a biologically-plausible model of decision uncertainty to show that shifts in metacognition are associated with disturbances in the interaction between decision-making and higher-order uncertainty-monitoring networks. This provides a first step towards a dynamical systems perspective on metacognition - one that models continuous interactions between different levels of the network. Excitingly, this approach also potentially enables inferences about uncertainty modulation (and, in turn, these facets of metacognition) from fits to first-order performance data alone. We related our model’s uncertainty modulation to individual differences in psychopathology (reanalysing existing data from the lab), and show that it can offer an implicit, low-dimensional marker of metacognitive (dys)function.
New paper by Tricia Seow and Marion Rouault in Biological Psychiatry
Tricia and Marion’s “How local and global metacognition shape mental health” has now been published in Biological Psychiatry. In this paper, we review current behavioral and neural metrics of local metacognition and address the neurocognitive underpinnings of global metacognition uncovered by recent studies. We then outline a theoretical framework in which higher hierarchical levels of metacognition may help identify the role of maladaptive metacognitive evaluation in mental health conditions.
New paper by Xiao Hu in Psychological Review
Xiao Hu’s paper “A Bayesian inference model for metamemory” has now been published in Psychological Review. In this paper, we introduce a Bayesian inference model for metamemory (BIM) which provides a theoretical and computational framework for the metamemory monitoring process. We show that the predictions of this model are consistent with previous studies on metamemory.
Steve's book "Know Thyself" now published!
Steve’s trade book about metacognition, “Know Thyself”, is now published! More information can be found here.
It was positively reviewed in Science here: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6541/470.summary
and was the feature of a New Scientist cover story! https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25033332-300-how-to-boost-your-self-awareness-and-make-better-decisions/
New paper by Nadine Dijkstra in Cognition
Nadine Dijkstra’s paper “Mistaking imagination for reality: Congruent mental imagery leads to more liberal perceptual detection” has now been published in Cognition. In a series of 3 experiments, we investigated whether people might confuse imagery for perception. We found that imagining a stimulus makes you more likely to report seeing it - and that this effect was both independent of expectation, and stimulus-specific.
See Nadine’s twitter thread for more details!
BrainInspired podcast on consciousness
Steve and Hakwan Lau took part in an episode of Paul Middlebrooks’ BrainInspired podcast on consciousness - listen again here!
Steve interviewed by Times Radio
Steve was interviewed for Hugo Rifkind’s Times Radio show on Saturday morning about metacognition, self-awareness, AI and lots more - listen again here:
Welcome to new Masters students Yuena and Cormac!
The MetaLab is glad to welcome Yuena Zheng (MSc in Neuroscience) and Cormac Dickson (MSc in Psychological Sciences) who will be doing their Masters projects with us this year. Yuena will be focusing how different regions in frontal and parietal cortex work together to support decision confidence formation, together with Dan Bang. Cormac will be working on expanding out the higher-order state space model of awareness to investigate temporal dynamics.
New EPSRC Programme Grant with University of Oxford
The MetaLab have been awarded an EPSRC Programme Grant as part of a large team of researchers based at UCL and Oxford, led by Ingmar Posner at the Oxford Robotics Institute. This £6M award with multiple industry partners aims to deliver autonomous robot systems which amplify human capacity and potential. More details about the broader project can be found here.
Steve’s role in the project is to lead work on metacognition - the ability to reflect on and evaluate other cognitive processes. We anticipate that by building metacognitive capability into the robots of the future, they will become able to know what they don't know, improving collaboration and trust in human-robot teams. We will combine research on humans and human-robot teams to map metacognitive processes in humans (such as confidence judgments) to similar processes in robots to identify gaps and opportunities for novel, neuroscience-inspired architectures.
We will be advertising for a postdoc to lead this work in early 2021, please do get in touch if it’s of interest!
Good luck to Oliver in his PhD!
Oliver Warrington will be leaving the lab this month, but is not going far - in January he starts his PhD with Peter Kok, also at the WCHN. Congratulations Oliver, and best of luck for these next steps!
New paper on information seeking in PNAS
Lion Schulz and Max Rollwage’s paper on relationships between dogmatism, confidence and information seeking is now out in PNAS! They find in two large online samples that being more dogmatic is characterised by a weaker link between confidence and information seeking in a simple perceptual decision-making task.
A Twitter thread explaining the findings is copied below, and a UCL press release is here. This was Lion’s Masters project in the lab, and he’s now a PhD student with Peter Dayan at the MPI for Biological Cybernetics.
Congratulations to Lion and Max!
New paper in PNAS
A new study on links between local and global metacognition led by Marion Rouault has been published in PNAS. Marion built on a previous paradigm she developed while a postdoc in the MetaLab, examining links between local confidence in individual decisions and “global” self-performance estimates (SPEs) over longer timescales. In conjunction with brain imaging, Marion has now shown that interactions between local and global confidence estimates are observed in ventromedial PFC and precuneus, whereas ventral striatal activity tracks global SPEs independently of local confidence. These results provide initial evidence that confidence signals are tracked across multiple hierarchical levels in the human brain.
Congratulations Marion!
New paper in Neuron
A new study published in Neuron and led by MetaLab postdoc Dan Bang in collaboration with Ken Kishida (Wake Forest University) and Read Montague (Virginia Tech) has revealed novel neuromodulator contributions to perceptual decision-making in humans. Dan combined a perceptual decision-making task with a rare opportunity to study neuromodulator fluctuations in patients undergoing deep brain stimulation (DBS) surgery. A novel method called “fast scan cyclic voltammetry” allows for the real-time measurement of neuromodulators such as dopamine and serotonin. In one part of the striatum (caudate nucleus), Dan found that serotonin levels rapidly increased when perceptual uncertainty was high. In another part of the striatum (putamen), both dopamine and serotonin were found to trigger the action that indicated a patient’s decision.
In our previous work using this task together with brain imaging, we focused on how different parts of cortex supports computations of sensory uncertainty and decision confidence. But brain imaging is normally blind to neuromodulator levels. Here, by collaborating with the fantastic teams at Virginia Tech and Wake Forest, we have now gotten a unique insight into how these neurochemicals contribute to the decision process.
More details about the study can be found in this news article on the WCHN website.
Congratulations to Dr. Nadine Dijkstra!
Congratulations to Nadine who recently defended her PhD entitled “Envisioning imagination: neural overlap between visual imagery and perception” at the Donders Center for Cognition. The viva in the Netherlands is full of ceremony that we are sadly denied here in the UK, as the picture below indicates. The award was made with a cum laude distinction, which is a fantastic achievement - well done!
If you are interested in reading more, Nadine’s thesis can be downloaded here.
Good bye and good luck to Max and Nadim!
Max and Nadim are both leaving the group this month to begin the competitive Entrepreneur First programme based in London. We wish them the best of luck, and hope that they stay in touch!
Their leaving do was held via Zoom, but some physical gifts were exchanged - coffee, beer and MetaLab mugs!
