Research
We study how the brain makes possible different forms of experience and behavior. Our main interest lies in consciousness, understood in two complementary ways: On the one hand, the overall level of consciousness and the type of experience it gives rise to, which varies across states such as wakefulness, sleep, anesthesia, psychedelic experiences, disorders of consciousness, and dementias. On the other hand, the content of experience, which we examine by analyzing how people reflect on their own perceptions and decisions, and how confident they are in what they know.
Some guiding questions
- 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 a psychedelic experience?
- How are confidence judgments formed during decision-making, and what neural evidence supports them?
- To what extent does Bayesian inference explain confidence biases observed in perceptual and learning tasks?
- What is the relationship between decision confidence and classical reinforcement learning algorithms in guiding exploration, information sampling, and value updating?