As the Danish physicist Niels Bohr once said "prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future". It is often difficult to foresee the consequences of our own action. In these uncertain times is important to renew our interest in a biological understanding of how, as humans, we make choices and more importantly how we can learn from our own mistakes through introspection. This workshop will bring together scholars from UCL and the CNR in Rome together with other leading figures from other EU Countries to discuss the most recent advances in the field of decision making and metacognition, fostering future synergic collaborations.

Our workshop intends to 1) survey the most important recent advancements, as well as the open questions, at the interface between decision-making and metacognition (“decisions about decisions”); 2) introduce a new audience to successful examples of the application of mathematical theories of decision-making and metacognition in psychology and cognitive neuroscience; 3) foster a debate between mathematical modellers, cognitive scientists and neuroscientists that are active in this new interdisciplinary area of research; and 4) make concrete steps towards a unified perspective on decision-making and metacognition, which links mathematical theory to empirical evidence.

The workshop will take place at the Aula Marconi of the National Research Council (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, https://www.cnr.it/en/reach-headquarters) on the 12th and 13th of March 2020*.

This workshop is free but reservation is necessary since there are limited places. If you have to cancel your registration please let us know to m.zurita@ucl.ac.uk, so we can give that space to someone else interested.

Day 1 (March 12th) – Main workshop

1:30pm

Arrival and coffee

1:50pm

Opening remarks

Giovanni Pezzulo / Benedetto De Martino

Session

1

Decision-making, and behavioural control

2:00pm – 2:45pm

Value, uncertainty and behavioural control

Benedetto De Martino, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, UCL (www.bdmlab.org)

2:45pm –3:30pm

Optimal embodied decision making from reinforcement

Nathan Lepora, University of Bristol (www.bristol.ac.uk/engineering/people/nathan-f-lepora/index.html)

3:30pm – 4:00pm

Coffee break

4:00pm – 4:45pm

TBA

Rafael Polania (decision.ethz.ch)

5:00pm – 6:00pm

Active inference, beliefs and curiosity

Karl Friston, Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging (www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/~karl/)

7:30pm

Speaker's dinner **

Day 2 (March 13th) – Main workshop

8:45am

Arrival and coffee

Session 2

Metacognition

9:15 am – 10:00am

Confidence computation from multimodal stimuli

Elisa Filevich, Humboldt-Universität (www.bccn-berlin.de/People/home/?contentId=3960)

10:00am – 10:45am

Neural mediators of changes of mind about perceptual decisions

Stephen Fleming, Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, UCL (www.metacoglab.org)

10:45am-11:15am

Coffee break

11:15am – 12:00pm

Metacognitive bias in perception of voluntary action

Lucie Charles, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, UCL (https://sites.google.com/site/luciecharlesneuro/home)

12:00pm-12:40-pm

Students, Postdocs spotlight (4)

12:40

Concluding remarks

Giovanni, Benedetto and Steve

* Participants will need to bring an ID card or passport the day of the seminar.

** If you plan to assist to the dinner send us a confirmation to m.zurita@ucl.ac.uk for reservation purposes. Dinner expenses will be covered only for the speakers.

Organizers: Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, National Research Council of Italy and Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London.