Hakwan Lau
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View article: Trait motivation is associated with Fusiform face area Morphometry Evidence from a Chinese Youth Sample
Trait motivation is associated with Fusiform face area Morphometry Evidence from a Chinese Youth Sample Open
Trait motivation is fundamental in shaping human behaviors. Previous studies have primarily focused on their impact on affective and motivational processing, with their role in perceptual processes less investigated. The present study take…
View article: Correcting for Unequal Variance in Signal Detection Models Using Response Time
Correcting for Unequal Variance in Signal Detection Models Using Response Time Open
This study examines performance evaluation in perceptual detection tasks using response-time-based signal detection theory (SDT) analysis. A defining feature of detection tasks is the asymmetry between trials with stimulus presence and abs…
View article: Representational Geometries of Perception and Working Memory: A Pilot Study
Representational Geometries of Perception and Working Memory: A Pilot Study Open
This study aims to compare the neural representational geometry of visual perception and visual working memory using human fMRI. In our pilot experiment, observers viewed a face-scene blended image (sample) and selectively attended to eith…
View article: Aphantasia modulates immersion experience but not eye fixation patterns during story reading
Aphantasia modulates immersion experience but not eye fixation patterns during story reading Open
Story reading is often accompanied by mental visualization of the scenes and the events described. Individuals with aphantasia, who report not experiencing vivid visual imagery, have recently been reported to be less absorbed and engaged w…
View article: PTSD therapy with fMRI-decoded neurofeedback bypassing conscious exposure: a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study
PTSD therapy with fMRI-decoded neurofeedback bypassing conscious exposure: a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study Open
Exposure-based therapy is effective for alleviating fear among patients with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Nonetheless, because the therapy itself induces fear, patients sometimes abandon treatment prematurely. One emerging altern…
View article: Attention robustly dissociates objective performance and subjective visibility reports
Attention robustly dissociates objective performance and subjective visibility reports Open
Attention generally enhances both visual performance and subjective appearance. Yet, at matched performance, unattended items can appear more visible than attended ones, a phenomenon called “subjective inflation.” Inflation, however, has o…
View article: Engineering Sentience
Engineering Sentience Open
We spell out a definition of sentience that may be useful for designing and building it in machines. We propose that for sentience to be meaningful for AI, it must be fleshed out in functional, computational terms, in enough detail to allo…
View article: Aphantasia modulates immersion experience but not eye fixation patterns during story reading
Aphantasia modulates immersion experience but not eye fixation patterns during story reading Open
Story reading is often accompanied by mental visualization of the scenes and the events described. Individuals with aphantasia, who report not experiencing vivid visual imagery, have recently been reported to be less absorbed and engaged w…
View article: Aphantasia modulates immersion experience but not eye fixation patterns during story reading
Aphantasia modulates immersion experience but not eye fixation patterns during story reading Open
Story reading is often accompanied by mental visualization of the scenes and the events described. Individuals with aphantasia, who report not experiencing vivid visual imagery, have recently been reported to be less absorbed and engaged w…
View article: Aphantasia modulates immersion experience but not eye fixation patterns during story reading
Aphantasia modulates immersion experience but not eye fixation patterns during story reading Open
Story reading is often accompanied by mental visualization of the scenes and the events described. Individuals with aphantasia, who report not experiencing vivid visual imagery, have recently been reported to be less absorbed and engaged w…
View article: Response Time as Decision Confidence: Insights from Type-2 ROC Analysis
Response Time as Decision Confidence: Insights from Type-2 ROC Analysis Open
This study explores receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis using response time (RT), a method that has received limited attention in the literature. Unlike ROC analyses based on confidence ratings or neural markers, RT-based ROC …
View article: What makes a theory of consciousness unscientific?
What makes a theory of consciousness unscientific? Open
Theories of consciousness have a long and controversial history. One well-known proposal — integrated information theory — has recently been labeled as ‘pseudoscience’, which has caused a heated open debate. Here we discuss the case and ar…
View article: The End of Consciousness
The End of Consciousness Open
This is a personal reflection on why I believe the science of consciousness may be taking a pernicious turn. The primary issue lies in the continued conflation of our supposed target phenomenon—subjective experience—with general cognitive …
View article: Modulating subjective pain perception with decoded Montreal Neurological Institute-space neurofeedback: a proof-of-concept study
Modulating subjective pain perception with decoded Montreal Neurological Institute-space neurofeedback: a proof-of-concept study Open
Pain is a complex emotional experience that still remains challenging to manage. Previous functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies have associated pain with distributed patterns of brain activity (i.e. brain decoders), but it i…
View article: A double‐blind trial of decoded neurofeedback intervention for specific phobias
A double‐blind trial of decoded neurofeedback intervention for specific phobias Open
Aim A new closed‐loop functional magnetic resonance imaging method called multivoxel neuroreinforcement has the potential to alleviate the subjective aversiveness of exposure‐based interventions by directly inducing phobic representations …
View article: Representation of visual uniformity in the lateral prefrontal cortex
Representation of visual uniformity in the lateral prefrontal cortex Open
Visual illusions tend to have early visual cortical correlates. However, this general trend may not apply to our subjective impression of a detailed and uniform visual world, which may be considered illusory given the paucity of peripheral…
View article: Metacognition as a window into subjective affective experience
Metacognition as a window into subjective affective experience Open
When patients seek professional help for mental disorders, they often do so because of troubling subjective affective experiences. While these subjective states are at the center of the patient's symptomatology, scientific tools for studyi…
View article: Is subjective perceptual similarity metacognitive?
Is subjective perceptual similarity metacognitive? Open
Perceptual similarity is a cornerstone for human learning and generalization. However, in assessing the similarity between two stimuli differing in multiple dimensions, it is not well- defined which feature(s) one should focus on. The prob…
View article: Individual differences in prefrontal coding of visual features
Individual differences in prefrontal coding of visual features Open
Each of us perceives the world differently. What may underlie such individual differences in perception? Here, we characterize the lateral prefrontal cortex’s role in vision using computational models, with a specific focus on individual d…
View article: Bonkerism: a NEW Science of Consciousness?
Bonkerism: a NEW Science of Consciousness? Open
Here I respond to Anil Seth’s recent article on the Worth of Wild Ideas (2023). The debate on whether the integrated information theory (IIT) of consciousness is pseudoscience continues, involving many authors on both sides. Here, instead …
View article: Open Review of Kawakita et al’s “Is my ‘red’ your ‘red’?” (2023) PsyArVix
Open Review of Kawakita et al’s “Is my ‘red’ your ‘red’?” (2023) PsyArVix Open
In this ambitious paper, the authors set out to answer a long-standing philosophical question, of whether perceptual experiences are the same across individuals. To do so they assume that the subjective experience of seeing a stimulus can …
View article: Confidence and metacognition
Confidence and metacognition Open
Humans are not passive recipients of information from the external world. They are “metacognitive” agents, actively engaged in self-referential monitoring of internally expressed information. This introspective insight in turn enables proa…
View article: Multi-voxel neuro-reinforcement changes resting-state functional connectivity: A pilot study
Multi-voxel neuro-reinforcement changes resting-state functional connectivity: A pilot study Open
Background Multi-voxel neuro-reinforcement has been shown to selectively reduce amygdala reactivity in response to feared stimuli, but the precise mechanisms supporting these effects are still unknown. The current pilot study seeks to iden…