February 2024: New PhD student

We are happy to welcome Shiva Mahdian as a new PhD student working on the temporal dynamics of conscious experience with sEEG. Shiva is co-supervised by Michael Pereira at the Grenoble Institute of Neuroscience. Welcome!

November 2023: New funding

Thrilled to announce that we obtained an ERC consolidator grant! The project called volta seeks to determine how evidence accumulation defines the stream of consciousness using LFP, SUA, and voltammetry recordings. This, in awake, sleeping, and anaesthetized humans. We will be hiring 3 PhD students and 3 postdocs starting in 2025. You can already reach out if you have expertise in electrochemistry, signal processing, and consciousness research. More details soon!



October 2023: New people

We are happy to welcome two new lab members! Perrine Porte is now a PhD student working on multisensory consciousness and metacognition. Jeanne Caron-Guyon is now a postdoc working on the neural correlates of consciousness during sleep. Welcome!

September 2023: New preprint

We submitted a new sEEG study led by Dorian, showing that both confidence and changes of mind derive from post-decisional evidence accumulation, notably instantiated in the insular and orbitofrontal cortices. More details here.

April 2023: New preprint

We submitted a new study led by Marie using a new continuous reproduction task to measure global confidence estimates. We show that participants monitor both endogenous and exogenous sources of uncertainty to estimate confidence. More details here.

March 2023: New preprint

We submitted a new study led by Martin documenting preserved metamemory and metaperception in schizophrenia. More details here.

February 2023: New article

Our study documenting preserved electrophysiological markers of confidence in schizophrenia is now published in the Schizophrenia journal. More details here. Congrats to Martin and team!


February 2023: New grants

Thrilled to announce that Michael Pereira was awarded an ERC starting grant, and Dorian Goueytes was awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship! CONGRATULATIONS!


January 2023: New doctor

Martin Rouy brilliantly defended his PhD entitled Behavioural and electrophysiological characterization of metacognitive deficits in schizophrenia spectrum disorder. Congratulation Dr Rouy!


October 2022: New preprint

We just published a follow up to our previous behavioral study showing no impairment of metaperception in schizophrenia. Here, we analyzed electroencephalographic data collected during the task, and found that the electrophysiological markers of confidence were similar between individuals with schizophrenia and healthy controls, further supporting our initial behavioral results. More details here.

September 2022: New article

Our opinion article regarding the ethics of animal consciousness research is now published in Perspectives on Psychological Sciences! More details here."

April 2022: New article

Together with Michael Pereira and Denis Perrin, we propose a Leaky Evidence Accumulation Process (LEAP) to explain some dynamic properties of perceptual consciousness and associated confidence ratings. More details here."

January 2022: New article

In this replication study led by Martin Rouy, we found that a previous attempt to improve metacognitive performance through feedback is likely to be impacted by experimental confounds. We address these confounds and discuss alternative ways to improve metacognition. More details here.



January 2022: New members

Childéric Dezier, Perrine Porte, and Clément Sauvage are joining our team for 5 months as part of their Masters degree at the University Grenoble Alpes. Welcome on board!



January 2022: New members

We are very happy to welcome Marie Chancel as a new postdoctoral scholar in the Metaction team! Marie obtained a PhD from Marseille university, and worked for 5 years as a postdoc at the Karolinka Institute. With us, she will focus on better understanding metacognitive failures. More details here. Welcome Marie :-)



November 2021: New preprint

In this opinion article, we argue that the scientific study of consciousness cannot, and should not, be morally neutral. This has big implications, notably regarding the question of animal models of consciousness. More details here.



September 2021: New article

A new fMRI study led by Giedre Stripeikyte in collaboration with Olaf Blanke’s lab shows that the phenomenon of attenuation is not limited to sensory events but extends to non-perceptual cognitive processes. More details here.



September 2021: New lab members

We are delighted to announce that Ramla Msheik and François Stockart start in the lab as PhD students, and Dorian Goueytes as postdoctoral scholar! Welcome on board!

March 2021: Habilitation

Nathan obtained his accreditation to supervise research (HDR in French). His defense gives an overview of past, present, and future research. The video is available here.

March 2021: New article

Our meta-analysis of metacognitive deficits in schizophrenia was accepted for publication in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews. Congrats to all authors, and specially to Martin for his first publication! More details here.



March 2021: New article

We are glad to announce that our preprint linking evidence accumulation with perceptual consciousness and monitoring was accepted for publication in Nature Communications. Congrats to Michael and co-authors! More details here.



March 2021: New preprint

Following up on our work reporting evidence in favor of an absence of metaperceptual deficits in schizophrenia, we conducted a meta-analysis of the calibration of confidence judgments in 1458 individuals with schizophrenia compared to 1337 matched controls. We provide evidence for the existence of a deficit in the calibration of confidence judgments in schizophrenia, which is inflated due to non-equated first-order performance.

Congrats to Martin for this first - first author paper! All details available here.



February 2021: New talk

Nathan gave a talk at the UCL consciousness club entitled ‘A shared mechanism for perceptual consciousness and monitoring’. The video is available here.



October 2020: New talks

Michael and Martin presented their brilliant work at Neuromatch 3.0. You can watch their presentations here.



October 2020: New members

We are lucky to host 6 new students in our team. Warm welcome to Eugénie, Lise, Flore, Hanna, Hugo, Ramla, and Wassila! Check out their profiles and projects in the team section."

September 2020: New article

Our study showing similar meta-performance between individuals with schizophrenia and matched controls is now published in the Journal of Psychiatry and Neuroscience! The manuscript, code, and data are available here.



October 2020: New PhD student

Audrey Kist obtained a PhD scholarship from the French government to continue investigating with us the subcortical correlates of consciousness, in collaboration with Mircea Polosan. Congrats Audrey!"

July 2020: New preprint

In this new study lead by Michael Pereira in collaboration with HUG and the Wyss Center, we had the opportunity to record single neurons in a human participant while he provided detection and confidence judgments. We combined this dataset with EEG recordings from healthy volunteers and a computational model to show that evidence accumulation by parietal neurons is a shared mechanism between conscious detection and confidence. See here for details.



March 2020: New article

Our EEG-fMRI study investigating the origins of confidence was accepted for publication in PNAS! The manuscript, code, and data are available here.



December 2019: New preprint

Our new study in collaboration with Paul Roux from Versailles Hospital shows that confidence in perceptual decision-making is preserved in schizophrenia. Against our pre-registered hypotheses, we found that individuals with schizophrenia had similar metacognitive performance as healthy matched controls, despite a weaker association between confidence and trajectory tracking during task execution among patients. Michael Pereira managed to reproduce some of these results with a bounded evidence accumulation model, which further showed that the two groups were characterized by similar decision-making processes. Data and scripts are available here



November 2019: New team member

We are absolutely thrilled to announce that Michael Pereira will join the team as a SNF mobility fellow from November! Michael has been collaborating with us for the last two years, and developped most of our current projects.

His plan is to investigate the subcortical correlates of consciousness using Deep Brain Stimulation, in collobaration with the University Hospital in Grenoble and West Virginia University.



September 2019: Master students

There are three new members in the team! Audrey Kist, Pauline Saliou, and Rémi Sanchez are all master students in University Grenoble Alpes. We are happy and honored to have them as trainees! Check out their profiles and projects in the team section.

August 2019: New preprint

With Elisa Filevich and Christina Koß from the metamotor lab in Berlin, we assessed the influence of action execution on confidence and metacognition. To do so, we devised a new paradigm in which participants responded only covertly to a first-order question, and then reported their confidence on a decision that they had not executed, but that we instead inferred. Against our preregistered hypotheses, results show that decision execution does not influence metacognitive performance. Find out why here, or play with data and scripts here.



August 2019: New team member

Martin Rouy will be the first of two PhD students funded for three years by MetAction. His work will consist in developing new tasks to capture and characterize metacognitive deficits in schizophrenia using psychophysics and EEG. Welcome on board!

April 2019: New article

Together with Jean-Paul Noel and several colleagues, we quantified the role of consciousness for multisensory integration using computational modeling and psychophysics (> 5000 trials in 30 subjects!). Our results show that the broadcasting of sensory information portends a graded relation between perceptual awareness and multisensory integration, implying that multisensory facilitation may occur under fully conscious or partially conscious, but not unconscious conditions.

Download the manuscript here, data and scripts are available here.

April 2019: New team member

Very happy to announce that Lucien Gyger will be the first member to join the team in October! Lucien is now finishing his PhD at the University of Lausanne. He will be kickstarting the experiments described in the metAction project, and pursue some of his own ideas linking structural imaging to cognitive functions.
We look forward to welcoming him!

March 2019: New article

Together with Julien Dubois, Naama Schwartz and Liad Mudrik, we used univariate and multivariate analyses of BOLD signal to describe the neural processing of visible and invisible natural scenes. We found that visible scenes were associated with activity in the lateral occipital, inferior temporal, parahippocampal, and prefrontal cortices, and that activity elicited by invisible scenes was decreased to the point of becoming undetectable.
You can now read the article, or play with the data!



February 2019: New funding

The project metAction was awarded an ERC starting grant of 1.4M€ for five years! We are looking for PhD students and postdocs, starting early 2019.
More details here. v

Dec 2018: New preprint

After two years of work, our new study investigating the origins of confidence is online: with Michael Pereira and Iñaki Iturrate, we combined EEG, fMRI, and computational modeling on a perceptual decision-making task to disentangle decisional and post-decisional contributions to confidence.
Check out the paper here. All data and scripts will be made available here soon.