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.

I wrote another blog for studio brein (in Dutch) about a breinwijzer presentation I attended focussing on transgenders and their brains. Very fascinating topic, altough the take-home message was -more or less- that there’s very little we already know about the brain of transgenders! So af often: more work to do! Read the full blog here

At this year’s annual meeting of the Belgian Association for Psychological Science (BAPS) I was awarded with the first PhD award (1000€) for my PhD work (The role of metacognition in cognitive control). Continue reading →

I wrote another blog (in Dutch) on breinwijzer.be, about decoded neurofeedback (DecNef) as a potential treatment for common fears (study by Taschereau-Dumouchel and colleagues, in PNAS 2018). Very cool approach, although I wasn’t fully convinced by the data itself. Read the blog here!

Awesome news: Our new paper with Annika Bolt and Nick Yeung is published in Psychological Science! You can find the paper here. The work done in this paper was performed back in 2015, when I spent three extremely fruitful months in the ACC lab at Oxford University.

Continue reading →

Last week, the work performed during the master thesis of Leonhard Drescher got accepted at PLoS ONE! The paper itself can be found here, and Lenny and I wrote a blog about it on breinwijzer.be (in Dutch). In this work, we used structural equation modelling to investigate the relationship between metacognition, cognitive control and mind wandering.

I wrote another blog (in Dutch) on breinwijzer.be, about the role of racial bias in the decision to shoot (study by Pleskac and colleagues 2017). Interesting application of the drift diffusion model outside the field it’s usually used. Read the blog here!

I wrote a new blog (in Dutch) on breinwijzer.be, about confidence in people suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder (Vaghi, Luyckx, et al., 2017, Neuron). Check it our here!

Over at the donnerlab, Anne Urai and I wrote a blogpost about our lab’s take on open science. Go check it out!

Avoiding the conflict: Metacognitive awareness drives the selection of low-demand contexts
Kobe Desender, Cristian Buc Calderon, Filip Van Opstal, Eva Van den Bussche

Previous research attempted to explain how humans strategically adapt behavior in order to achieve successful task performance. Recently, it has been suggested that 1 potential strategy is to avoid tasks that are too demanding. Continue reading →