After lurking around in the lab for almost a year now, Alan now also officially joines the lab as a PhD student. It will be a joint PhD project, together with the lab of Andero Uusberg (Tartu University). To make it more official, he now also has his own page on our lab website! A very warm welcome Alan, and good luck!

We welcome a new (yet familiar) face to the lab: after a very succesfull internship last year, Hélène will now join the lab again to carry out her PhD! A very warm welcome, and good luck 🙂

Desender, K., K.R. Ridderinkhof, & Murphy, P.R. (2021). Understanding neural signals of post-decisional performance monitoring: An integrating review. eLife. [code] [pdf]

*Desender, K., *Teuchies, M.*, Gonzalez Garcia, C., De Baene, W., Demanet, J., & Brass, M., (2021). Metacognitive awareness of difficulty in action selection: the role of the cingulo-opercular network. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. [pdf]

Why do some actions feel easy whereas with others are experienced as more difficult?

Desender, K. & Sasanguie, D. (2021). Math anxiety relates positively to metacognitive insight into mathematical test performance. Psychological Research. [PDF]

Noting that the field of visual metacognition lacks clear consensus goals, Doby Rahnev (Georgia Tech), gathered researchers working in the field to discuss medium and long-term goals for the field. During long an intense virtual meetings, we discussed the big questions we think the field should address, and subsequently wrote a paper about these goals (preprint). The hope is that by explicitly spelling out these goals, the field will make faster progress towards understanding visual metacognition.

If you are interested in multitasking (and you speak Dutch) be sure to listen to this short podcast from EOS on the topic. Apart from Kobe Desender, the podcast features Senne Braem (UGent) and Pieter Roelfsema (Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience).

“We all have our philosophies, whether or not we are aware of this fact, and our philosophies are not worth very much. But the impact of our philosophies upon our actions and our lives is often devastating.” Karl Popper, Objective knowledge (1972)

This opinion piece was inspired by our two-weekly Journal Club on the topics of the ‘researcher’s degrees of freedom’ (see Simmons, J. P., Nelson, L. D., & Simonsohn, U. (2011). False-positive psychology: Undisclosed flexibility in data collection and analysis allows presenting anything as significant. Psychological science, 22(11), 1359-1366.) and the replication crisis in psychology (see Open Science Collaboration. (2015). Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science. Science, 349(6251).). It narrates a personal reflection of Katrien, a last-year psychology student, on the matter of how our philosophies shape our (scientific) world.

Exciting times, as Kobe takes up his new position at the Brain and Cognition research unit of the KU Leuven, where he will start his own lab. For lack of a better name called “DesenderLab” now, but that might still change – suggestions welcome!

As you can see under the ‘Lab Members‘ tab, it is going to be quite crowded. Pierre Le Denmat joins the lab to work on his PhD project about how people learn to be confident (with Tom Verguts, UGent); Robin Vloeberghs joins the lab to work on his PhD project about the role of confidence in sequential decisions (with Anne Urai, ULeiden) and Gaia Corlazolli joins the lab to work on her PhD project about sharing of metacognition (with Wim Gevers, ULB). In addition, Katrien Vandenbroeck (UGent) and Hélène Van Marcke (UGent) will perform their 6 months research internship here, and Alan Voodla (UTartu, Estonia) will join 3 months as a visiting PhD student.

Finally, we drafted a lab philosophy page, reflecting the values that we wish to stand for as lab. This is supposed to be a dynamic document – so any input and suggestions are highly welcomed!

As of now, I am looking for a motivated PhD student to conduct research in the field of decision making and confidence at KU Leuven. The project will be co-supervised by Prof. Tom Verguts (UGent). The position is for four years , preferably starting October 2020.  => the position has been filled!