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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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.

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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!

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