We study how the brain generates and monitors internal states that give rise to different forms of experience and behavior. Our research focuses on consciousness understood at two complementary levels:
1) Global states of consciousness, referring to the overall level and mode of experience across wakefulness, sleep, anesthesia, psychedelic states, and disorders of consciousness; and
2) Metacognition and confidence, referring to how individuals evaluate their own perceptions and decisions, and how subjective confidence is constructed and used to guide behavior.
Some guiding questions
Global states of consciousness
- What patterns of brain activity allow us to identify transitions between wakefulness, sleep, anesthesia, and psychedelic states?
- Can these patterns predict recovery in patients with disorders of consciousness?
- What neural mechanisms are altered to give rise to psychedelic experiences?
Metacognition and confidence
- How are confidence judgments formed during decision-making, and what neural evidence supports them?
- To what extent can Bayesian inference explain confidence biases observed in perceptual and learning tasks?
- What is the relationship between decision confidence and reinforcement learning mechanisms in guiding exploration, information sampling, and value updating?