David Soto

@dsotob.bsky.social

Studying awareness and metacognition at BCBL in Spain, formerly at U of Birmingham and Imperial College London. Eclectic music fan, husband and dad.

Check out this thread - and please RT 🙏 Shaked and Itay argue that t-test and LMMs (and their Bayesian parallels) are not adequate for testing chance performance, and suggest alternative, more powerful tests. We hope you will find this useful, especially when studying unconscious processes

@shakedlublinsky.bsky.social · 6d ago

Can we make objective awareness tests more powerful? In our new paper (doi.org/10.1093/nc/n...; Neuroscience of Consciousness), we introduce two tests (frequentist and Bayesian) that outperform commonly used tests, based on extensive simulations and reanalyses of published datasets. (1/9)

PREPRINT: We efficiently extract a set’s mean and variance without representing each item. Yet the neural basis remains unclear. Using fMRI-MVPA, we test whether ensemble codes are shared across features—orientation, shape, & animacy—and statistics—mean & variance www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

Neural Representations of Ensemble Mean and Variance Across Visual Features

Humans can rapidly extract summary statistics, such as the mean and variance of visual features, to efficiently represent complex visual environments despite limits in attention and working memory. Al...

biorxiv.org

PSA for trainees cold emailing with interest in joining a lab: Be careful about your use of LLMs in writing these emails!! It is now *extremely* common to get emails with a bizarrely-detailed, clearly-LLM take on a paper finding or with specific phrases pulled from the lab website. Don’t do this!

New paper: "Introspection and Scientific Data" for the Handbook of Introspection, about the role of introspection in the production of scientific data. My view: introspection doesn't deliver a special 'subjective' kind of data and there's nothing special about studying consciousness.

Exciting news, I just gave a talk on how two heads can be better than one... even in children! 🧠👧👦 Very grateful for the kids, that are the heart of this project, the parents who believed in this research from the start, and to the teachers. Here's to the power of collaboration, at every age! 🙌

Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language (BCBL)@bcbl.bsky.social · 3mo ago

🔙 Ayer celebramos el acto de clausura del curso 2025-2026 del #JuniorLab en el colegio Carmelitas Sagrado Corazón de Vitoria. La investigadora Francisca Matias presentó los resultados de su investigación y Clara Martin abordó el #multilingüismo. 👀👇

authors.elsevier.com/c/1nA3C_KOmx... new paper in Neuron in which we argue that many claims on consciousness in AI & animals etc are inconsistent. they are driven by theories/views that are not really supported by empirical evidence. they confuse subjective experience w/ cognition or perception

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authors.elsevier.com

Massive study in @nature.com, converges with our past study of 750,000 people (Sea hero quest) to show u-shape curves for the impact of sleep. We studied cognition, here its disease impact: Sleep chart of biological ageing clocks in middle and late life www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Sleep chart of biological ageing clocks in middle and late life - Nature

A cross-organ, multi-omics U-shaped relationship between sleep duration and biological ageing clocks highlights the potential of sleep optimization to promote healthy ageing, lower disease risk and ex...

nature.com

Introducing meta-🔼! (meta-delta) Really excited about this one. We provide a principled, performance-corrected measure of metacognitive bias, placing it on an equal methodological footing with meta-d, and showing robust test-retest reliability to boot. Check out Kevin's thread for more details! 🧠🧪

Kevin O’Neill@kevingoneill.github.io · 3mo ago

In a new preprint w/ @tianqizhan.bsky.social & @smfleming.bsky.social, we developed a new measure of metacognitive bias (over/under confidence in individual decisions)! doi.org/10.31234/osf...