MAPS 2025

Stephen Fleming - University College London, UK

How the human brain thinks about itself: mechanisms for metacognition

The human brain has a remarkable ability to monitor and evaluate its own mental states, known as metacognition. Metacognition enables us to recognise gaps in our knowledge and collaborate effectively. Conversely, problems with metacognition are linked to maladaptive behaviours, such as endorsing false beliefs or being unaware of our own limitations. In my talk I will review the development of experimental and modelling tools that allow us to isolate how metacognitive capacity relates to human brain function and supports a rich awareness of our skills and capabilities. I will explore the psychological structure of metacognition across different tasks and cognitive domains, and describe recent behavioural and neuroimaging experiments which investigate how and whether people are able to tell the difference between reality and imagination. I’ll end by considering the implications of a science of metacognition for education and AI.

Evan F. Risko - University of Waterloo, Canada

Cognitive Offloading: Adventures in Distributing Cognition

There seems little doubt that advances in technology are changing our day-to-day cognitive lives. As each advance drives deeper into the cognitive milieu a renewed appreciation of the fundamentally distributed nature of cognition is emerging. Our ability to flexibly deploy mixtures of internal and external resources in pursuit of our cognitive goals represents a defining feature of what it means to be a successful cognitive agent in a complex environment. My laboratory’s research has tried to provide some insight into these interactions. In particular, one important class of behaviour that these internal-external ensembles afford is cognitive offloading: we can use external resources to do some of the cognitive work for us. Despite the ubiquity of this type of behaviour, it has only recently become the target of systematic investigation in and of itself. I will review research from our laboratory and others that focuses on offloading in the context of memory and metamemory and explore the future of research in distributed cognition more broadly.

Ophelia Deroy, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Germany

Metacognition across senses and social contexts: Implications for aging

How do we assess our own certainty when we stand to be corrected by others? Do we express it differently if we know that our judgment matters to others? More generally, how does our self-assessment shift depending on the perceived social stakes and contexts? These are the questions I will address in this talk. I will present recent research from our lab on perceptual metacognition within diverse social contexts, not only in vision but also in less studied senses. These insights also offer us a glimpse into how aging might reshape metacognitive processes across sensory domains, suggesting that social dynamics play a critical role in our self-awareness as it evolves.

Erika Borella, University of Padova, Italy

Re-unveiling the link between metacognition and memory in older adults

Metacognition is a crucial aspect of our everyday cognitive functioning. While some of these metacognitive processes, such as monitoring, remain intact in aging, others decline. Salient changes affect metacognitive knowledge, such as beliefs about aging, cognitive ability, and one’s cognition functioning. It is, thus, essential to address and correct misconceptions about one's cognitive and memory functioning, as well as the age-related changes that accompany it, to help older adults manage and maintain their cognitive and memory performance. The present talk will review empirical advances and meta-analytic evidence on the efficacy of metacognitive training in aging. I'll discuss the results of metacognitive intervention approaches and cognitive training procedures developed in my lab. Finally, I will deepen the role of metacognitive processes, with their distinct but interdependent components, and the importance of targeting both metacognitive processes and strategies to “optimally” support older adults’ cognitive and metacognitive functioning.

Daniel Yon, Birkbeck - University of London, UK

Understanding uncertainty in the human mind

A common thread running through various domains in psychological science - including perception, learning, social cognition and metacognition - is the idea our minds and brains keep track of uncertainty. In recent years, thinking in these areas has been transformed by models which suggest that we form beliefs about uncertainty, and forming the wrong beliefs may be at the heart of various unusual and pathological cases. But despite the widespread appeal of this idea, we don’t really know whether or how these beliefs about uncertainty are formed. In this talk, I will describe work from my lab that provides the first steps towards answering this question. This will include describing how our minds and brains form and use expectations about perceptual uncertainty - and how we might ‘inherit’ beliefs about uncertainty by interacting and communicating with others.

Ingrid Johnsrude, Western University, Canada

What is effortful listening?

When speech is masked or degraded in some way, demands are placed on cognitive processes beyond those needed for comprehension of clear speech. Such recruitment is probably why listening in noise “feels” effortful, even when intelligibility is high. Increased effort is aversive and tiring, and the goal of making listening less effortful is increasingly recognized as important. In this talk, I will critically discuss what it might mean to “listen effortfully”, cognitively and neuropsychologically. I will describe how I think about listening effort, and how a reframing of the construct, focusing on individual differences in cognition, may enable research progress.

Jonas Obleser, University of Lübeck, Germany

Meta-listening - Signatures of objective and subjective performance in the listening brain

Based on our research on the neurobiological and psychological processes in challenging listening situations, my lab and I have come to realise the importance of dissociating seemingly objective performance and its neurophysiological signatures in M/EEG, pupillometry, or fMRI from a listener’s subjective goals, perceptions, and beliefs. In this talk I will thus embed our recent findings in younger as well as ageing listeners into a framework of “meta-listening” aiming to incorporate trait- and state-like metacognitive differences in listening and research and its neurobiological implementations.

CAtS Laboratory | Francesco Pavani, Chiara Valzolgher, Elena Giovanelli, Elena Gessa

Main Findings from the Project Never stop listening! Promoting healthy ageing potentiating metacognitive and self-regulating abilities when listening in noisy places

The “Never Stop Listening” project, explored the themes of listening in noise and metacognition, with a specific focus on healthy aging. The project addressed three key questions: whether aging individuals have effective metacognitive skills for hearing in noise, whether they spontaneously implement self-regulation strategies to cope with noisy environments, and whether these skills can be trained. To investigate these questions, a series of behavioral studies were conducted, leveraging virtual and augmented reality to create interactive and ecologically valid scenarios. The findings revealed that older adults, both with and without hearing impairments, exhibit largely preserved metacognitive skills in relation to listening in noise. However, older adults with hearing impairments reported using some non-verbal strategies less frequently than those with normal hearing. Furthermore, compared to younger adults, older individuals tended to implement fewer head movement strategies in noisy virtual environments. The “Never Stop Listening” project culminated in the development of a training program aimed at improving metacognitive and self-regulation strategies for hearing in noise among older adults. This training has the potential to support healthier aging by enhancing adaptive listening skills in everyday environments.