Visit to Westminster Academy school
Steve visited Westminster Academy school to talk about what it’s like to be an academic and cognitive neuroscientist and discuss the science of self-awareness. Lots of great questions, the future is in safe hands!
New paper on social confidence in Nature Communications
Our paper on “Neurocomputational mechanisms of confidence in self and others” is now out in Nature Communications. Congratulations Dan!
This project had a long gestation, being one of the last Steve designed and ran as a postdoc with Nathaniel Daw at NYU in 2014 (!)
A thread from Dan explaining the paper is here:
New paper on consciousness in Nature Reviews Psychology
With Hakwan Lau, Matthias Michel and Joe Le Doux, we have written a recent opinion piece in Nature Reviews Psychology entitled “The mnemonic basis of subjective experience” outling how implicit knowledge of a quality space may support the capacity to say what an experience is “like” (a relational judgment between two points in perceptual space). This is exciting because it captures the famous “what it is like” definition of phenomenology in computational terms, and leads to testable experiments about the functional role and neural implementation of conscious processing.
MetaLab at ASSC
A number of the MetaLab visited Amsterdam for ASSC25 for all things consciousness and metacognition. It was great to be back in person with colleagues after 2 years of the pandemic. Thanks to the organisers for putting together a brilliant week in a fantastic location!
Astrid, Sucharit, Benjy and Yuena all gave poster presentations (you can download their posters below).
Steve and Sucharit gave a meta-d’ tutorial (code here), and Steve participated in the Great Consciousness Debate representing higher-order theories.
To cap it all Steve, Megan Peters, Doby Rahnev and Lucie Charles organised the inaugural Perceptual Metacognition Satellite meeting with keynotes from Pascal Mamassian and Janneke Jehee.
What a week!
The lab in the time of ShPL
Steve took Shared Parental Leave (ShPL) for 3 months with his baby daughter Isla, and the MetaLab are grateful for Marco stepping into the breach and keeping everyone on the rails!
UCL Neuroscience Symposium
Steve gave one of the plenary lectures at the UCL Neuroscience Symposium - the first after the pandemic, and entitled “Reconnecting UCL Neuroscience: From Cells to Society”. It was a great event, with some stunning talks from across the faculty, including brilliant student prize talks.
Alexane presented her poster on her Masters project with Nadine, and got some very useful feedback - well done Alexane!
Matan and Nadine's paper on dissociating confidence from visibility published in J Neurosci
Nadine and Matan worked together to reanalyse some existing data in the lab, to ask whether prefrontal signals linked to stimulus visibility (and by implication, visual awareness) are confounded by decision confidence. The short answer is yes - but they also provide a novel method for controlling for this confound. More details in the (tag team!) twitter thread, and in the paper which is now in press at Journal of Neuroscience. Congratulations Nadine and Matan!
Matan's paper on second-order knowledge and visual search now out
Matan’s paper, “Efficient search termination without task experience” is now out in Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Matan used a novel one-trial many-subjects design to show that people are already efficient (fast) at recognising the absence of a target in an array of distractors without any prior experience. This shows that they have implicit second-order knowledge about visual search performance (they know that if a target had been present, they would have seen it quickly) before they even engage with a task
Nadine's paper on reality monitoring published in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews
A paper on potential mechanisms for perceptual reality monitoring (how we tell what is reality, and what is imagined) is now out in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, led by Nadine Dijkstra and together with Peter Kok. Congratulations Nadine!
Steve interviewed by Sam Harris on the "Making Sense" podcast
Steve was interviewed by Sam Harris for the Making Sense podcast - they talked about the relationship between self-awareness and intelligence, self-monitoring, theory of mind, deception and self-deception, metacognitive failures, dementia and lots more. Listen again here (subscription required to access the full episode):
Welcome to Sucharit!
Sucharit Katyal has joined the MetaLab as a postdoc working at the Max Planck Centre for Computational Psychiatry, in collaboration with Steve, Ray Dolan and Quentin Huys. He plans to focus on developing new tools for metacognitive training, and the impact of such training on mental health. Welcome Sucharit!
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/
