Very honored that I’m among the 5 nominees for the EOS pipet 2020, an award for promising researchers in Belgium! As part of this nomination, I gave an interview to EOS about my research (in Dutch) and they made a little movie (also in Dutch). There is also an audience award where you can vote, but be sure to first check out the other nominees too as they all do super interesting work!
After months of hard work and crossed fingers I can finally share the exciting news: coming October I will be starting as a research professor at the research unit Brain and Cognition at the KU Leuven! I’m super excited about this, and looking very much forward to this next step in my career. At the KU Leuven, I will (try to) unravel how humans learn to evaluate their own decisions (i.e., how human confidence evolves) and how this has implications for cognitive control.
Get in touch with me if you are interested to collaborate on one of these topics – particularly for interested students, there certainly are some opportunities!
By Kobe Desender & Tobias H Donner.
Humans can provide precise judgments of the accuracy of their choices. When we feel confident in a choice we have just made, the probability is high that it was actually correct. Conversely, when we feel uncertain, the probability of being correct is very low. In recent years, many researchers have examined computational and neural underpinnings of this subjective sense of confidence. A central question for the field is what sense of confidence is good for – in other words, how it is put to use in the brain (Meyniel et al, 2015). Continue reading
Thanks to huge efforts of Doby Rahnev, a large collection of open data on behavioral tasks using subjective ratings was just made available. The database contains (at current) 145 datasets, and is fully open for everyone to use. I added a couple of my own datasets on subjective difficulty, with the hope that people might find it interestingt to examine whether different types of ratings (confidence, subjective difficulty, etc.) show the same or different dynamics. I think this is a great, ambitious project, that can tremendously speed up model developments! The database itself can be found here, while a paper describing the database can be found on psyarxiv. If you want to help popularizing the database on twitter, here’s Doby tweet about it.
In order to make this page more fun to visit, I added a couple of songs from my band to this website! In my free time, I play keys and guitar in Tales of Taori, and make music together with Mr Oak in Rhubarb, so a bit (more) shameless self-promotion!
One of the ideas I’d like to pursue is to actually make songs about my research, which I think is an enourmous untapped market! Hopefully soon…
As of now, we are looking for a motivated PhD student to conduct research in the field of cognitive control under the supervision of Eva Van den Bussche, Kobe Desender and Gethin Hughes. The position has been filled – but contact me if you’re interested to collaborate!
Awesome news: our paper on the neural markers of confidence and information seeking, with Peter Murphy, Annika Boldt, Tom Verguts and Nick Yeung, has now been in accepted in The Journal of Neuroscience. You can find the paper here! Data collection for this study was done back in 2015 (ages ago, it feels) when I spent three months in Nick Yeung’s lab at Oxford University. Actually, I collected these data in the very last week of my stay there – so the ratio data analysis/writing versus data collection for this project must be about 205:1.
Awesome news today: two research grant proposals were accepted by the FWO-Vlaanderen, so soon we’ll be investigating the contagious nature of cognitive control (with Eva Van den Bussche and Gethin Hughes) and the influence of certainty and urgency on making choices (with Elise Lesage and Tom Verguts). Very excited about both of these – guess we’re looking for interested, prospective PhD-students from now on!
I just posted my first preprint: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/10/02/433276.
Here, we followed up on the findings of our recent psych science paper, and tested which neural markers translate subjective confidence into overt decisions to sample additional information. Using multivariate single-trial decoding, we showed that a classifier trained to decode high vs low confidence from EEG data, can predict information-seeking choices. Thus, our findings unravel a shared neural coding for decision confidence and information-seeking choices!
Curious to see how this will work out.
