Annika BoldtUniversity College London | UCL · Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience
Annika Boldt
Dipl. Psych., DPhil
About
29
Publications
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1,153
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Introduction
Additional affiliations
December 2014 - present
October 2011 - June 2015
November 2006 - August 2011
Publications
Publications (29)
How do we remember delayed intentions? Three decades of research into prospective memory have provided insight into the cognitive and neural mechanisms involved in this form of memory. However, we depend on more than just our brains to remember intentions. We also use external props and tools such as calendars and diaries, strategically placed obje...
Metacognition describes the process of monitoring one's own mental states, often for the purpose of cognitive control. Previous research has investigated how metacognitive signals are generated (metacognitive monitoring), for example, when people (both female/male) judge their confidence in their decisions and memories. Research has also investigat...
How do we remember delayed intentions? Three decades of research into prospective memory have provided insight into the cognitive and neural mechanisms involved in this form of memory. However, we depend on more than just our brains to remember intentions. We also use external props and tools such as calendars and diaries, strategically-placed obje...
Confirmation bias-the tendency to overweight information that matches prior beliefs or choices-has been shown to manifest even in simple reinforcement learning. In line with recent work, we find that participants learned significantly more from choice-confirming outcomes in a reward-learning task. What is less clear is whether asymmetric learning r...
Confirmation bias - the tendency to overweight information that matches prior beliefs or choices - has been shown to manifest even in simple reinforcement learning. In line with recent work, we find that participants learned significantly more from choice-confirming outcomes in a reward-learning task. What is less clear is whether asymmetric learni...
Metacognition describes the process of monitoring one’s own mental states, often for the purpose of cognitive control. Previous research has investigated how metacognitive signals are generated (metacognitive monitoring), for example when people judge their confidence in their decisions and memories. Research has also investigated how these metacog...
Background:
Cognitive offloading is the use of physical action to reduce the cognitive demands of a task. Everyday memory relies heavily on this practice; for example, when we write down to-be-remembered information or use diaries, alerts, and reminders to trigger delayed intentions. A key goal of recent research has been to investigate the proces...
When external feedback about decision outcomes is lacking, agents need to adapt their decision policies based on an internal estimate of the correctness of their choices (i.e., decision confidence). We hypothesized that agents use confidence to continuously update the tradeoff between the speed and accuracy of their decisions: When confidence is lo...
Uncertainty is ubiquitous in cognitive processing. In this study, we aim to investigate the ability agents possess to track and report the noise inherent in their mental operations, often in the form of confidence judgments. Here, we argue that humans can use uncertainty inherent in their representations of value beliefs to arbitrate between explor...
Background: Cognitive offloading is the use of physical action to reduce the cognitive demands of a task. Everyday memory relies heavily on this practice, for example when we write down to-be-remembered information or use diaries, alerts, and reminders to trigger delayed intentions. A key goal of recent research has been to investigate the processe...
Decisions are usually accompanied by a feeling of being wrong or right – a subjective confidence estimate. But what information is this confidence estimate based on, and what is confidence used for? To answer these questions, research has largely focused on confidence regarding current or past decisions, for example identifying how characteristics...
Theoretical work predicts that decisions made with low confidence should lead to increased information-seeking. This is an adaptive strategy because it can increase the quality of a decision, and previous behavioral work has shown that decision-makers engage in such confidence-driven information-seeking. The present study aimed to characterize the...
In the absence of external feedback about decision outcomes, agents need to adapt their decision policies based on their internal evaluation of their own performance (i.e., decision confidence). We hypothesized that agents use decision confidence to continuously update the tradeoff between the speed and the accuracy of their decisions: When confide...
Theoretical work predicts that decisions made with low confidence should lead to increased information-seeking. This is an adaptive strategy because it can increase the quality of a decision, and previous behavioral work has shown that decision-makers engage in such confidence-driven information seeking. The present study aimed to characterize the...
There is currently little direct evidence regarding the function of subjective confidence in decision making: The tight correlation between objective accuracy and subjective confidence makes it difficult to distinguish each variable’s unique contribution. Here, we created conditions in a perceptual decision task that were matched in accuracy but di...
Uncertainty is ubiquitous in cognitive processing, which is why agents require a precise handle on how to deal with the noise inherent in their mental operations. Previous research suggests that people possess a remarkable ability to track and report uncertainty, often in the form of confidence judgments. Here, we argue that humans use uncertainty...
The decisions we make are usually accompanied by a feeling of being wrong or right – a confidence estimate regarding the correctness of our decisions. The questions which information this confidence estimate is based on, and what confidence is used for, have increasingly become a focus of research into decision-making. This research has largely foc...
Human observers effortlessly and accurately judge their probability of being correct in their decisions, suggesting that metacognitive evaluation is an integral part of decision making. It remains a challenge for most models of confidence, however, to explain how metacognitive judgments are formed and which internal signals influence them. While th...
Empirical evidence indicates that people can provide accurate evaluations of their own thoughts and actions by means of both error detection and confidence judgments. This study investigates the foundations of these metacognitive abilities, specifically focusing on the relationship between confidence and error judgments in human perceptual decision...
The human mind is extraordinary in its ability not merely to respond to events as they unfold but also to adapt its own operation in pursuit of its agenda. This 'cognitive control' can be achieved through simple interactions among sensorimotor processes, and through interactions in which one sensorimotor process represents a property of another in...
We studied the case of transparent word labels (e.g., "push") placed on glass doors, when viewed from the other side as mirror-reversed script, hence requiring an action opposite to word meaning. As compared with a regular view, labels seen "from the other side" in the glass door situation caused strong delays of actions and a tripling of error rat...
When the lateralized readiness potential (LRP) is recorded in stimulus-response compatibility (SRC) tasks, two processes may overlap in the LRP, stimulus-driven response priming and activation based on response selection rules. These overlapping processes are hard to disentangle with standard analytical tools. Here, we show that Residue Iteration D...
Questions
Questions (2)
Dear RG community,
I would like to move more of my behavioural experiments online for convenience. What non-proprietary language do people recommend?
A bit of background: In the past years and after trying a range of approaches I have stuck with Psychtoolbox. What I like about it is that I can get precise timings (I sometimes do EEG), can go deep in terms of randomisation (I would not be able to use a drag-and-drop toolbox, my designs are usually quite complex and sometimes I need to interact with external hardware such as MRI trigger boxes) and it also avoids object-oriented programming, which -- and this might give away some of my own inexperience with this approach -- I find clunky and unsuitable for sequential stimulus presentation (e.g. I have used GWT in the past and wasn't happy with precisely that).
I would use my university servers to run the studies and would like to also be able to run the studies locally in a browser, for instance when I use them for an MRI study.
Any recommendations? Thank you so much in advance!
Best wishes,
Annika
Any advice is very much appreciated. Thank you.
