ECSU updates (May 2026)

April was a busy month at the unit — papers landing, an experiment hitting its data-collection finish line, and a first pilot on the books. Here's the roundup.

A second paper from Kazuma. Perceptual sensitivity, but not metacognitive monitoring, is shaped by increases and decreases in control came out online in Experimental Brain Research on April 30. Across two experiments it shows that we detect losses of control more sharply than gains, but our metacognitive sense of "how sure am I?" doesn't carry the same asymmetry — pointing toward two distinct perceptual processes feeding a shared confidence layer above. Co-authored with Wen Wen, Shunichi Kasahara, and Tom. DOI: 10.1007/s00221-026-07306-w

Data collection done. The PCE hyperscanning replication — our pre-registered re-do of the perceptual crossing experiment — finished its final EEG sessions on April 30. Months of recruitment, dual-cap setups, and patient lab work behind us; pipeline validation begins now. Big credit to Brian and Tae and the rest of the PCE team for getting it across the line. (Photo: the team in the Human Behavior Lab on the day data collection closed.)

Carbonation, take one. Keisuke Shiba, our visiting researcher from Suntory, ran the first pilot of the carbonation-intensity EEG study on April 21, with Brian supporting data collection and Milan advising on the analysis. Now it's time to dive into the data for a closer look.

Off to Yale. Tom was an invited speaker at the 2026 International Symposium on Embodied Cognition at Yale (April 18), hosted by the Brain Peace Science Foundation. Beyond the talks themselves, the trip seeded some good new conversations with colleagues working on procedural skill acquisition and the timescales of action.

A long-form Q&A. Tom conversed with Grant H. Brenner for an extended interview on Psychology Today — "Probing the 'Black Box' of Consciousness" — covering the figure-ground reversal irruption theory asks for if we want to detect the mind at work; everyday phenomena like choking under pressure; an "irruption meter" thought experiment using consumer EEG; and how the framework parts ways with the standard family of emergence/functionalism/supervenience accounts.

New arrivals. As we publish this, Saisha Rankaduwa (PhD student, Dalhousie University) is arriving on a Killam International Research Award for a two-month visit to work on EEG hyperscanning, and Julia Zasada, an OIST rotation student newly arriving from the MSc programme in Modeling for Neuronal and Cognitive Systems (Côte d'Azur University), joins as the primary blinded analyst on the PCE replication.

ECogS 2026. The abstract submission window has closed — thank you to everyone who sent something in. We're now shaping the program for November 9–13 at OIST, and acceptance decisions go out shortly.

More next month.