New paper published in Nature Communications

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.

Steve appointed Fellow of Canadian Institute for Advanced Research

Steve has been appointed a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, in the Brain, Mind and Consciousness Program.

CIFAR is a Canadian-based global research organisation that brings together teams of top researchers from around the world. There are only 20 Fellows worldwide in the Brain, Mind and Consciousness programme. The CIFAR programme will provide funds for the MetaLab’s research into consciousness and metacognition.

Exciting times for consciousness research!

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/pals/news/2023/jan/professor-steve-fleming-appointed-fellow-canadian-institute-advanced-research

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!

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!

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