The capacity to self-evaluate and control one’s own cognitive performance, known as metacognition, underpins adaptive learning, social behaviours and self-belief. Stephen Fleming outlines our current ...

How does metacognitive skill shape perceptual comparison performance? A new paper led by our postdoc Zoë Little finds people can identify which face matching decisions they might get wrong—and improve their accuracy by spending more time on these cases.

Objects in the real world frequently move along complex, non-linear trajectories shaped by their environment. As they do, they often pass temporarily out of sight, occluded by the surrounding environm...

Mental representations are the explanatory construct of the cognitive sciences, but there is no widely accepted characterization of how they cause behavior. Visual representational geometry can be quantified by similarity scores, but almost all methods require an explicit judgment. To examine how representations cause behavior by varying task demands, observers must perform different tasks while continuously reporting similarity, leading to dual-task interference. This study develops scanpaths as an implicit similarity measure, and uses representational similarity analysis to validate it. Observers searched for a target; fixations on distractors may reveal similarity. Similarity was also quantified by an odd-one-out task in the same participants, and ratings from different participants (Jiang et al. 2022). Representational geometries between tasks correlated. A generative model predicted first fixations in novel data. This double validation of the scanpath method opens the door to examining the causality of representations by determining if and how they vary with task demands. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.

Multivariate analyses of magneto-/electroencephalography (M/EEG) data are typically performed on neural responses time-locked to discrete stimulus onsets. Such designs usually reveal high decoding performance during the initial transient response (0–500 ms), which subsequently drops to a lower, sustained level. Here, we examined time-resolved EEG decoding of natural scene processing when scenes gradually enter the visual field without a clear onset. We created video sequences in which one scene category (e.g., a beach) smoothly transitioned into another category (e.g., a forest) by blending two scenes into a single composite panorama and moving a square aperture across it. We compared EEG decoding for the first scenes within the transitions, which appeared with a sudden, artificial onset, to the second scenes, which emerged naturalistically as the videos progressed. For the first scenes, we observed robust category decoding from 60 ms after onset with a clear peak structure. For the second scene, category decoding was markedly weaker and showed no discernible peak structure. Realigning the appearance of category-diagnostic content for the second scene using deep neural networks did not enhance decoding or recover a peak structure. Furthermore, classifiers trained on the first scene generalized to the second, but with a broad, temporally diffuse pattern, instead of a diagonal pattern more consistent with a shared hierarchical processing timeline. Together, these findings demonstrate that time-resolved EEG decoding is sensitive to stimulus-presentation context. Accordingly, temporal decoding patterns obtained in conventional trial-based paradigms may not generalize unchanged to conditions involving gradual scene transitions and continuous visual input. NEW & NOTEWORTHY Using multivariate EEG decoding, we show that scene-category information follows different temporal profiles across two presentation regimes: abrupt scene appearance after a grayscale screen and gradual scene emergence during continuous visual input. Our findings demonstrate that time-resolved decoding is sensitive to stimulus-presentation context and should not be interpreted as an invariant signature of a fixed visual processing hierarchy.

One-to-one face matching is widely used for identity verification yet becomes difficult with unfamiliar faces or when parts of the face are covered. We investigated whether observers could accurately ...

Science chats with a researcher whose team is using “timescapes” to understand how nonhumans experience the world

YouTube video by Neural basis of Consciousness & Qualia Structure

Episodic memory stores not only passively experienced events, but also one’s own past actions and decisions. Despite their critical role for learning …

As neuroscientific theories of consciousness continue to proliferate, the need to assess their similarities and differences – as well as their predict…

Illusory transitions in conscious visual perception involve both early visual cortex and higher-order motor cortices.

Cambridge Core - Neurosciences - Scientific Theories of Consciousness

Thank you for your interest in this ACNS Webinar. This is one of a series of talks from international speakers that we have planned throughout 2026. Please complete this form to register for the event...

Your brain is constantly gathering evidence for making decisions – even when there’s only one option to pick from.

Social sciences; Psychology