Alan Lee

Happy to share my first-ever pre-print !!!! 🚨 on the representational geometry across similarity properties using behavioral judgments, fMRI, and AI/CNNs models 🚨 !! 1/n🧵 preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps...

Here rdcu.be/es8A1 we respond to the recent (unfair) editorial in Nature about recent criticisms of IIT theory of consciousness. We keep fighting for transparent and serious science. @hakwan.bsky.social @felipedebrigard.bsky.social @deanbuono.bsky.social

relationship between sensory evidence and confidence evidence

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)

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 🧵

Home This satellite meeting showcases the latest research on metacognition, in the form of both keynotes and short oral presentations. About this meeting The Metacognitive Science Meeting grew out of an ...

We are extremely excited to announce the 4th edition of the Metacognitive Science Meeting (formerly known as the Perceptual Metacognition Satellite) - to be held on August 11th 2025, right before @cogcompneuro.bsky.social in Amsterdam!

For info and how to submit: sites.google.com/view/metacog...

This reminded me that I used this quote to start my review of Maja Spener's recent book "Introspection". You can find the review here: shorturl.at/nUnNe. The review should come out in MIND fairly soon.

William James's take on psychophysics is *incredible*. Worth reading the whole quote. #psychSciSky #philsky #VisionScience

"But psychology is passing into a less simple phase. Within a few years what one may call a microscopic psychology has arisen in Germany, carried on by experimental methods,

Check out our work on change detection during saccades! 👀

On the "great consciousness debate" - as an outsider, I was fascinated by the magnitude of the response - it's so much larger than anything I've seen for, say, data falsification in the Alzheimer's space or outrage around claims about serotonin and depression. /1

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Re the Tononi paper: Both Tononi’s IIT (phi) and Friston’s FEP start from fundamental, axiomatic, and debatable assumptions. These assumptions are generally made without any humility. This logic allows them to make exceptionally broad claims. Which contributes to my unease about them.

Our findings suggest that confidence serial dependence is not simply due to "sticky / leaky" responses; instead, it reveals that our metacognitive system, much like our sensory/perceptual systems, adapts to recent events by systematically adjusting its computational characteristics.

The best model that best explains confidence serial dependence is the model that 1) systematically jitters criteria based on preceding confidence, 2) uses only explicit confidence responses., and 3) reaches as far as two trials back (wish we could test this further...) for information.

We built and compared several computational models with different configurations for the criterion-updating mechanisms, e.g., we asked whether decision criteria, based on preceding information, are dynamically updated trial to trial, or systematically jittered on every trial from a fixed template.

Interestingly, this serial dependence requires a continuity of confidence responses: without that in the preceding trial, the serial dependence disappeared, even when observers were prompted with "easy/hard" preceding difficulty or were "yoked" to give the high/low ratings in preceding trials.

We replicated the well-known "confidence leak" @dobyrahnev.bsky.social found: confidence at target trial was higher if it was preceded by high-confidence (easy) trials, and lower if by low-confidence (hard) ones, despite matched task performance. It's more than just a leak; it's serial dependence.

In 3 experiments, we varied task difficulty over a short sequences of trials (e.g., hard->hard->[medium], easy->[medium]) to prompt observers to give a specific pattern of confidence ratings before the [target trial] at constant difficulty level and, thus, matched task performance.

New preprint from my lab: What are the computaitonal processes underlying serial dependence of confidence judgments? Through 3 experiments + model comparison, we showed that the metacognitive system systematically adjusts decision criteria in response to preceding conditions.
osf.io/preprints/ps...

A comprehensive assessment of current methods for measuring metacognition - Nature Communications Measuring metacognitive ability is one of the enduring challenges in cognitive science. The current paper develops formal tests of the quality of different measures and assesses how current metrics pe...

My article "A comprehensive assessment of current methods for measuring metacognition" is finally out in Nature Communications 🎉 If you work on metacognition and think you know the psychometric properties of your favorite measure, you may be surprised.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

congratulations everyone, we have now passed 12 million people total on bluesky!!! 🦋

over 1.2M new people have joined bluesky in the last two days — welcome!! 💙🕺🪩

Figure 1 showing our multimodal metacognition battery. All participants completed measures of metamemory (semantic and recognition), vision (metadots), and recognition memory, together with pre and post self belief measures.

New preprint! Do men and women differ in their metacognitive abilities? In a new preprint, we detail robust differences in global and local metacognition which span multiple cognitive domains. Read all about our findings in this thread! #psychology #neuroskyence
osf.io/preprints/ps...

Lawful good: Bayesian models Neutral good: Social network analysis Chaotic good: Dynamical systems theory Lawful neutral: Drift diffusion True neutral: Information theory Chaotic neutral: Agent-based models Lawful evil: Symbolic logic Neutral evil: Neural networks Chaotic evil: Quantum mechanics

I have a bunch of things I have to get done, so naturally I decided to procrastinate by making an alignment chart of mathematical models

Enhanced Mind-Matter Interactions Following rTMS Induced Frontal Lobe Inhibition A major barrier to acceptance of psi is that effects are small and hard to replicate. To address this issue, we developed a novel neurobiological mode…

Ahm, Cortex - I have questions:
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
#neuroskyence #PsychSciSky

@saurabhr.bsky.social's first paper from my lab (on reality monitoring of memories) is ready to share! In our task, participants either perceived word pairs or voluntarily imagined the second word of a word pair. osf.io/preprints/ps... 1/n

The receptive fields of cells in primary auditory cortex show *opposite* impacts of attention to a tone if the detection of that tone means the animal should start vs stop licking.

I find it hard to believe the brain really needs to be this integrated and complicated.
www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

from @alanlee.bsky.social

"[..] Hoel argues [...] that the media have not exaggerated the empirical support for IIT. [...] The present article is a short reply [...] presenting the reality [..] with [...] a sample of 20 quotes from different articles in the media."

psyarxiv.com/g35ak

The purpose of the first draft is to exist

The Harvard Professor and the Bloggers When Francesca Gino, a rising academic star, was accused of falsifying data — about how to stop dishonesty — it didn’t just torch her career. It inflamed a crisis in behavioral science.

Anyone else think it was weird that NYTimes called Francesca Gino a Harvard professor, but Professors Nelson (Berkeley), Simmons (Wharton) and Simonsohn (ESADE) are "bloggers"?

www.nytimes.com/2023/09/30/b...

abstract for the linked paper

A network plot depicitng different subdomains of metacognition.

How do we integrate prior beliefs with new experiences to guide metacognitive self-knowledge? psyarxiv.com/knsb4/ A brief 🧵 on our recent preprint👇, in which we found that this capacity for integrating different sources of uncertainty is highly domain specific. #psychscisky 🧠🤖 🧠🟦

Thinking about grad school? I'll be looking for PhD students through Cognition & Perception (https://as.nyu.edu/departments/psychology/graduate/phd-cognition-perception.html) & Data Science (https://cds.nyu.edu/phd-admissions-req/) at NYU. Research areas available here: https://lindsay-lab.github.io

A simple statistical framework for small sample studies bioRxiv - the preprint server for biology, operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a research and educational institution

Many psychophysics & brain mapping studies use small samples. This often deeply confuses editors & reviewers trained on population statistics. It can also make it difficult to preregister & interpret such studies. Here we attempt to change that:
doi.org/10.1101/2023...
#neuroscience #visionscience