Julian Matthews

It was a pleasure publishing with CommsPsychol in the RR format. Highly recommended! 🌟

Huge thanks to the amazing team @RIKEN_CBS and editors/reviewers at @commspsychol.nature.com !

Kazuhisa Shibata, Hiroki Ohashi, Sofia Nagisa, & Narumi Sugihara 🙌

A plot from the paper that shows negligible effect of limiting time or motor preparation on metacognitive efficiency measures.

A plot from the paper that shows negligible effect of report order on metacognitive efficiency measures.

The result: negligible effect ⚡

Metacognitive efficiency is robust to report order—it need not constrain study design and secondary analysis...

But watch out if you use regression measures?! 😱

See the full story here: 👉 www.nature.com/articles/s44...

#psychology #OpenScience #neuroscience

A figure from the paper illustrating the study design: Three report orders determine the arrangement of task decisions and confidence ratings: (1) decision followed by confidence, (2)decision simultaneous with confidence, and (3) confidence followed by decision.Three report contexts test the influence of reaction time and motor preparation. (1)In the time limited context, participants had 2.8 seconds in total to make the task decision and confidence rating. The response annulus appeared at a new, random angle on each trial. (2) In the baseline context, participants had unlimited time toreport, but the response annulus appeared at a new, random angle on each trial. (3)In the motor fixed context, participants had unlimited time to report, and the response annulus was fixed in the same position on every trial. An orange spot is added to each annulus in this figure to aid in visualising the rotation. This spot was not presented to participants.

We tested this directly, 2 experiments (perception & memory, n=175) controlling for ⏱️ timing and ✋ motor preparation.

7 registered hypotheses and 3 different measures unpacked order bias from all angles.

A picture of our paper's abstract and title: The order of task decisions and confidence ratings has little effect on metacognition. Task decisions and confidence ratings are fundamental measures in metacognition research, but using these reports requires collecting them in some order. Only three orders exist and are used in an ad hoc manner across studies. Evidence suggests that when task decisions precede confidence, this report order can enhance metacognition. If verified, this effect pervades studies of metacognition and will lead the synthesis of this literature to invalid conclusions. In this Registered Report, we tested the effect of report order across popular domains of metacognition and probed two factors that may underlie why order effects have been observed in past studies: report time and motor preparation. We examined these effects in a perception experiment (n = 75) and memory experiment (n = 50), controlling task accuracy and learning. Our registered analyses found little effect of report order on metacognitive efficiency, even when timing and motor preparation were experimentally controlled. Our findings suggest the order of task decisions and confidence ratings has little effect on metacognition, and need not constrain secondary analysis or experimental design.

🚨 Out now in @commspsychol.nature.com 🚨
doi.org/10.1038/s442...

Our #RegisteredReport tested whether the order of task decisions and confidence ratings bias #metacognition.

Some said decisions → confidence enhances metacognition. If true, decades of findings will be affected.

Dog-sled going past the Le Château Montebello.

Main public room in Le Château Montebello decorated for Christmas. The building is the world's largest "log cabin".

Le Château Montebello is situated on the banks of the Ottawa river, separating Quebec and Ontario.

Group photo the school of 2018 at the Winter school on the Neuroscience of Consciousness

CIFAR invites applications for senior PhD and postdocs to participate in the Neuroscience of Consciousness Winter School, held in Montebello, Canada Dec 10-12, 2025. The Winter School is hosted by members of CIFAR’s Brain, Mind, and Consciousness program. Please repost.
cifar.ca/next-generat... 🧠🧪

Help Anna Raise Funds To Beat Dementia! On Saturday, 24 May, I'm taking part in Redcliffe's Memory Walk & Jog to raise funds to support Australians impacted by dementia. This is a cause close to my heart and I would love your support. Pleas...

My family and I will take part in the Memory Walk this year supporting those living with dementia and their current/former carers ♥️

We would appreciate any donations you can spare: www.memorywalk.com.au/fundraisers/...

Automatic multisensory integration follows subjective confidence rather than objective performance - Communications Psychology Using a confidence-accuracy dissociation paradigm, the study finds that multisensory integration follows subjective confidence instead of objective accuracy. Further modeling suggests shared computati...

Using a confidence-accuracy dissociation paradigm, the study finds that multisensory integration follows subjective confidence instead of objective accuracy. Further modeling suggests shared computations between confidence and multisensory integration.
www.nature.com/articles/s44...

A good point Ken, exacerbated by large indiv. differences in metacog across the gen. population.

Some of these data (eg @hohwy.bsky.social & mine, w/ descriptions of each participant from our neurologist collaborators) are publicly available. A good opportunity for indiv. diff. analysis imo!

Going ‘meta’: a systematic review of metacognition and functional neurological disorder Sadnicka et al., overview experimental data that has examined metacognition in patients with functional neurological disorders (FND). Interestingly, most s

Lovely/comprehensive review of metacognition and functional neurological disorder; a condition that demands a metacognitive interpretation: doi.org/10.1093/brai...

The emerging picture aligns with findings in psychopathology more broadly—metacognitive performance is often equivalent to controls.

Having now read two dozen or so ARC Discovery Project EOIs the best advice I can give everyone preparing one is to simplify their writing a lot. You're not writing for experts, the whole College of Experts is involved, you'll have people who have no clue about your discipline assessing this

Wish I could be there! Bryan is a fantastic instructor.

Excited to be here with @bethfisher.bsky.social and Mengting Zhang from @monash-m3cs.bsky.social at ACNS mers.cventevents.com/event/ACNS20... @acnsau.bsky.social

I'll be presenting active inference modelling work on meditative deconstruction and letting go.

Introspective psychophysics for the study of subjective experience Abstract. Studying subjective experience is hard. We believe that pain is not identical to nociception, nor pleasure a computational reward signal, nor fea

now out in Cerebral Cortex! my newest opinion piece,
"Introspective psychophysics for the study of subjective experience"
#neuroskyence #neuroAI #consciousness #introspection #psychology

academic.oup.com/cercor/advan...

Optimal metacognitive decision strategies in signal detection theory - Psychonomic Bulletin & Review Signal detection theory (SDT) has long provided the field of psychology with a simple but powerful model of how observers make decisions under uncertainty. SDT can distinguish sensitivity from respons...

finally published! Optimal metacognitive decision strategies in signal detection theory -- with the brilliant Brian Maniscalco and Lucie Charles
#neuroskyence #neuroAI #metacognition #consciousness #psychology

link.springer.com/article/10.3...

In this new preprint @smfleming.bsky.social and I present a new theory of the functions and evolution of conscious vision. This is a big project: osf.io/preprints/ps.... We'd love to get your comments!

Hello world! Australasian Cognitive Neuroscience Society is on bsky! #ACNSnews

Congrats Huw! I genuinely look forward to reading it.

Sentience - ABC listen Sentience is a puzzle - and an increasingly important one. The question of exactly what constitutes sentience, and which organisms possess it, is hotly contested. But with scientific evidence emerging...

ABC's Philosopher's Zone is a favourite of mine from the radio station's stable.

Here's the wonderful recent episode on animal+ sentience with @birchlse.bsky.social

www.abc.net.au/listen/progr...

Standardised images of novel objects created with generative adversarial networks - Scientific Data Scientific Data - Standardised images of novel objects created with generative adversarial networks

Is perceptual novelty important in your research? We created, standardised, and validated a database of truly novel perceptual stimuli (matched to BOSS objects on size, contrast, luminance & colourfulness) so you don't have to! www.nature.com/articles/s41...
#cogpsy #psychology #EEG #neuroskyence

Our latest work, up as a preprint to enjoy.

We gave LLMs tasks adapted from experimental psychology to see how they contribute to teamwork.

We found LLMs were reasonable at monitoring tasks but were poor at tasks requiring planning and strategising.

It was only a matter of time - a metacognition starter pack!

Do let me know if I’ve missed people or if you’d like to be added

#neuroskyence 🧪

go.bsky.app/9PSjwLF

Autistic traits foster effective curiosity-driven exploration Author summary Research has long recognized that individuals display curiosity and explore their environments in order to learn. It is suggested that personal characteristics, including autistic trait...

In our latest work on curiosity, we show how autistic traits influence free exploration! Out now in PLOSCompBiol!
journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

Figure showing a key manipulation in the paper. A set of images or colors are remembered, and then the memory test pits an item you saw vs one that is similar to the tested item or another remembered item.

New preprint where @mmrobinson93.bsky.social and I jump into the literature on meta-cognition (hopefully in a useful way!): osf.io/preprints/os... We show that a simple memory model (TCC) can be straightforwardly adapted to make predictions about confidence #neuroscience #psychscisky

Keen to be added 👍

I think it was missing to I created a Consciousness Science Starter Pack:
go.bsky.app/T8z9NP4
I can still add ~90 people so if you want to jump in, let me know!
And if you don't want to be there, let me know as well of course.
The boundaries of consciousness research can be hard to determine!

Welcome Mel! Great to have you on here

Hi Bluesky! ☀️

We are an open-source statistics program that is free, friendly, & flexible. Armed with an easy-to-use GUI, we enable both classical & Bayesian analyses.

Over 340 universities in over 70 countries use JASP.

Follow us to get notified on our latest features & stats news.

Super relevant for some of the things a group is studying at RIKEN, have passed it on!

Frontiers | Users do not trust recommendations from a large language model more than AI-sourced snippets BackgroundThe ability of large language models to generate general purpose natural language represents a significant step forward in creating systems able to...

Our latest paper: "Users do not trust recommendations from a large language model more than AI-sourced snippets” www.frontiersin.org/journals/com...