No two humans behave exactly alike. But what about neural networks? We found early evidence that human-like individual differences in behavior emerge from networks trained with different initializations. Here’s a peek at our results—to be presented at UniReps & DBM @NeurIPS. Full paper on the way!

My lab at Boston University has open positions for a postdoc and PhD students. We study visual perception, attention, and decision making with a focus on temporal dynamics. Check out our recent work here sites.bu.edu/denisonlab/ and email me if you're interested in learning more

📣 BIG NEWS EVERYONE. I am so excited to announce… 🎉 I’m moving to University College London @ucl.ac.uk to join the Experimental Psychology department in @uclpals.bsky.social! 🎉 The big move happens in spring/summer. So I’m already exploring recruiting staff & students at UCL for fall 2026!

It looks like stimulus manipulations can be divided into "task-defining" and "auxiliary". The manipulations from each group have very different effects on accuracy vs. confidence. And all auxiliary manipulations seem to work in basically the same way. Really cool stuff by @herrickfung.bsky.social.

Glad to see my first-year project is out! In two experiments, we manipulated multiple stimulus features in a perception task, yet their effects on confidence and accuracy fell into just two distinct behavioral patterns, offering a way to predict the effects of novel stimulus manipulations. 1/n

World models are a highly speculative topic in AI as well as in cognitive science. I’m excited to share my manuscript on investigating internal world models using imagination networks in humans and LLMs! 🧵1/n arxiv.org/abs/2510.04391

Introducing hMFC: A Bayesian hierarchical model of trial-to-trial fluctuations in decision criterion! Now out in @plos.org Comp Bio. led by Robin Vloeberghs with @anne-urai.bsky.social Scott Linderman Paper: desenderlab.com/wp-content/u... Thread ↓↓↓ #PsychSciSky #Neuroscience #Neuroskyence

Do you ever compute d' in detection tasks? Because of unequal variance, d' is biased in such tasks and you can't fix the bias without confidence ratings. In this preprint led by Kiyo Miyoshi and @hakwan.bsky.social, we show how to use RT instead of confidence to fix the d'. osf.io/preprints/ps...

Our work showing human-like individual differences in perceptual decisions emerge from random weight initializations in deep neural networks has been accepted in two NeurIPS workshops! 🎉 Awesome job by my student @herrickfung.bsky.social in collaboration with the amazing @apurvaratan.bsky.social.

Common neural choice signals reflect accumulated evidence, not confidence! Now out in @cerebralcortex.bsky.social w @helenevanmarcke.bsky.social @pierreledenmat.bsky.social @yfvisser.bsky.social @denizerdil.bsky.social a.o. Paper: desenderlab.com/wp-content/u... Thread ↓↓↓

Want to exclude a study from a review or meta-analysis because you don't like it but don't have an objective reason for the exclusion? Fear not. Here's the paper you need to cite.

New lab preprint led by Medha Shekhar in collaboration with @axc.bsky.social. We investigate what drives confidence in decisions of real-world complexity (perception and memory questions about short videos). It turns out confidence is influenced by so many factors! osf.io/preprints/ps...

Super excited to kickstart our Metacognitive science satellite meeting, just before the CCN conference in Amsterdam! Organised with @dobyrahnev.bsky.social @meganakpeters.bsky.social and @stvemillertime.bsky.social

1/3) This may be a very important paper, it suggests that there are no prediction error encoding neurons in sensory areas of cortex: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... I personally am a big fan of the idea that cortical regions (allo and neo) are doing sequence prediction. But... 🧠📈 🧪

This is promising to be a very exciting event. If you're going to CCN or just want an excuse to come to Amsterdam, make sure to check it out.

Still time to register for our Metacognitive Science satellite at @cogcompneuro.bsky.social on 11th August! metacognitivescience.org We have an exciting lineup covering computational, neural and AI approaches to metacognition, plus keynotes from Uta Noppeney and @ingmarposner.bsky.social 🥳

Confidence in absence as confidence in counterfactual visibility: a CogSci proceedings paper with star MSc student Maya Schipper, is now out on PsyArXiv: osf.io/preprints/ps... 🧵👇

What does our conscious perception of this set of berries consist of? If you heard about Ensemble perception, you could say: “It’s too much info for our poor attention/working memory systems, so instead of storing all the individual features, people just represent the average and variability.” 1/5

“Mountainhead” has me revisiting this topic.

We have a PhD position for an upcoming project in metacognition research in Potsdam / Berlin. A great opportunity for those interested in cognitive modeling of confidence and EEG. More information at coconeuro.github.io/phd2025 Kindly share this opportunity with potential candidates - Thanks!

My short take on when we'd be able to do mind uploading. My speculation: between 100 and 200 years from now. theconversation.com/can-you-uplo...

Another wonderful VSS, including the first "Confidence dinner" - nice to see a vibrant community studying visual metacognition. Next up, the CCN Satellite on Metacognitive Science (abstract being accepted until May 27): sites.google.com/view/metacog....

Proud to play a small role in this null result - from the excellent and thorough @carolinephelps.bsky.social. No effect of chronic or acute pain on working memory in the Sternberg task.

(2) the Metacognitive Science Satellite w/ @smfleming.bsky.social @luciecharlesneuro.bsky.social and @dobyrahnev.bsky.social sites.google.com/view/metacog... come join CCN & talk about neuroscience, consciousness, metacognition, & the role of philosophy in pushing the whole CCN enterprise forward!

there's still time to submit your abstract to the Metacognitive Science meeting in Amsterdam in August -- a satellite to @cogcompneuro.bsky.social ! sites.google.com/view/metacog...

Great to see our research, led by @johannakuci.bsky.social, covered in The Transmitter. One of the more surprising findings to have come out of the lab.

Neuroscientists should embrace variability in neuroimaging studies, according to researchers who showed that decision-making is associated with subtypes of brain activity. By @claudia-lopez.bsky.social #neuroskyence www.thetransmitter.org/behavior/dur...

Differences in psychologists’ cognitive traits are associated with scientific divides https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-025-02153-1 New in NHB #metascience #metaresearch

Very happy to announce that our paper “Sensory Horizons and the Functions of Conscious Vision” is now out as a target article in BBS!! @smfleming.bsky.social and I present a new theory of the evolution and functions of visual consciousness. Article here: doi.org/10.1017/S014.... A (long) thread 🧵

If you work with perceptual confidence judgments, you may be interested in our CNCB model of confidence ratings. Joint work with Vincent de Gardelle. Uncorrected proofs here: dx.plos.org/10.1371/jour... (🧵 1/4)

Happy to share our new paper exploring how the brain might represent decision confidence. A population representation of the confidence in a decision in the parietal cortex: Cell Reports www.cell.com/cell-reports...

Check out our latest paper today in Nature: “Goal specific hippocampal inhibition gates learning” www.nature.com/articles/s41... By Nuri Jeong, Xiao Zheng, Abby Paulson, Steph Prince and colleagues.

osf.io/preprints/ps... turns out, u can analyze meta-d' w/ just reaction times rather than confidence. loses some info & also a bit different. but maybe RT really isn't so metacognitive, so we might have to call it pseudo-meta-d' new preprint with Kiyo Miyoshi & Doby Rahnev 🧠📈

Our final session looks ahead to our future with AI. Moderated by @dobyrahnev.bsky.social, the panel will feature @neuranna.bsky.social , @neuroai.bsky.social, Hannah Choi, and @doctor-bob.bsky.social.

Next, we’ll have a panel on Advancing Cognitive Science with AI featuring Georgia Tech faculty @neuranna.bsky.social, @dobyrahnev.bsky.social, @crozell.bsky.social, and Sashank Varma. Can AI be used to reveal the internal processing of our minds, which is famously difficult to measure? #GTFrontiers

11 of about 55 PIs terminated at NINDS yesterday, with downstream effects for all of us in terms of the lost research into neurological disease and stroke. 1/ www.wired.com/story/doctor...

Congrats to Kayla Peelman on publishing her paper AND defending her thesis in the same week ✨🎉 Click 👇 to see how the environment shapes the timing and selectivity of vision 👁️🧠🧪 www.cell.com/current-biol...

Our "I would have seen it if it were there" paper — a collaboration with @ranimo.bsky.social and @clarepress.bsky.social — is now out in Psych. Review. There’s a lot in this paper, but here are what I see as the 3 main takeaways: psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...

Come and become my colleague! Georgia Tech has a non-tenure track Academic Professional position in Neuroscience. This is a great environment with neuro exploding on campus, and Atlanta is an awesome place to live. DM me with questions. careers.hprod.onehcm.usg.edu/psc/careers/...

new preprint just dropped! Revealing higher-order neural representations with generative artificial intelligence led by @hazimi.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2503.14333 thread 👇 1/n

So excited to be hosting this at @cogcompneuro.bsky.social this year! Check out our shiny new website & name, & come join us to talk ALL THINGS METACOGNITION in August in Amsterdam! FREE registration but spots are limited! Keynotes and short contributed talks! Submit your talk now on our website!

Very excited to organise the 4th edition of the Metacognitive Science Meeting in Amsterdam just before the @cogcompneuro.bsky.social conference, on Monday 11th Aug 2025. More information to come soon but please save the date!

So excited for the new chapter of what is now the Metacognitive Science Meeting. Hope to see many of you in Amsterdam!

Excited to share this new empirical work funded by @templetonworld.bsky.social, replicating & extending the work of John Grimes on change blindness during saccades: osf.io/preprints/ps... It was a full team effort across two labs, with important contributions from proponents of HOT & IIT

Do null group-level effects reflect the mixture of true subject-level effects at opposing directions? In a new paper, now accepted at Psychological Bulletin & Review (osf.io/preprints/ps...), we turn this question to the field of unconscious processing (1/14)

In a new paper in Communications Psychology, we show that automatic multisensory integration follows subjective confidence instead of objective accuracy. These findings provide a link between early cue combination and late metacognitive processes. www.nature.com/articles/s44...

If, like me, you (a) oppose research funding cuts to US institutions and (b) are Jewish, please consider signing this open letter: forms.gle/prnRbq69a6YN...

LLMs have shown impressive performance in some reasoning tasks, but what internal mechanisms do they use to solve these tasks? In a new preprint, we find evidence that abstract reasoning in LLMs depends on an emergent form of symbol processing arxiv.org/abs/2502.20332 (1/N)

Why Tononi et al's defense of IIT fails to convince me. medium.com/@kording/86f...

1/ "A science of consciousness beyond pseudo-science and pseudo-consciousness" is out now! it was a joy to coauthor this commentary with Àlex Gómez-Marin @behaviOrganisms for @NatureNeuro, in which we try find some positive lessons in the clash over IIT www.nature.com/articles/s41...