In a nutshell

Our current work is focused on understanding core psychological and neural mechanisms enabling human conscious experience, and the relationships between metacognition, self-awareness and mental health. We aim for a computational-level understanding of these psychological phenomena.

Specific projects

(see linked webpages for more detail)

Consciousness Computation - Steve’s ERC Consolidator Award examining computational components of conscious awareness.

Empirical Tests of Higher Order Theories of Consciousness (ETHOS) - An adversarial collaboration funded by the Templeton World Charity foundation testing distinct predictions of Higher-Order Theories of consciousness.

A bit more detail

We are currently interested in a number of different questions:

  • What are the nature of higher-order (HO) states contributing to consciousness? Are they rich or sparse, and what information do they carry? We have developed a computational framework, the higher-order state space model, that advocates a sparse hypothesis, and we are using this to design novel brain imaging experiments to probe neurocomputational features of awareness judgments.

  • How does the brain represent the absence of knowledge? How do we know what we don’t know? We think that this capacity might be central for the development of abstract states supporting perceptual awareness.

  • Does metacognition (thinking about ourselves) share computational and neural resources with thinking about others? What are the links between social cognition and consciousness?

  • How is a “global” sense of confidence about our skills and abilities formed and updated? How is it built up from local confidence and error signals? Can it be altered with training or feedback?

  • How do we distinguish perception from imagination? How does metacognition contribute to perceptual reality monitoring, and what is the relationship between reality monitoring and conscious experience?

  • What are the functions of conscious experience? How does consciousness relate to other aspects of decision-making and behavioural control?

  • Could other information-processing devices such as artificially intelligent systems exhibit consciousness and/or human-level metacognition?

  • Can an understanding of the features and limits of human metacognition lead to a better design of human-robot teams? How might we best share confidence and uncertainty in such situations?