We study how the brain generates and monitors its own internal states, and how these give rise to different forms of experience and behavior. Our work is organized along two lines:
1) Global states of consciousness: the overall level and mode of experience across wakefulness, sleep, anesthesia, psychedelic states, and disorders of consciousness.
2) Metacognition and confidence: how individuals evaluate their own perceptions and decisions, how subjective confidence is constructed, and how it is used to guide behavior, learning, and exploration.
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?
- How far does Bayesian inference go in explaining confidence, and which biases reveal mechanisms that depart from optimality?
- What is the relationship between decision confidence and reinforcement learning in guiding exploration, information sampling, and value updating?