C-Lab

Professor of Social Sciences at the Institute of Psychology, Jagiellonian University.
Founder of the C-Lab.
Head of the lab.

Professor of the Jagiellonian University, Director of the Centre for Brain Research, Jagiellonian University; Vice-Dean for the Scientific Affairs, Faculty of Philosophy, Jagiellonian University; Director of the International PhD Programme in Cognitive Neuroscience (CogNeS). Founder and the Head of Consciousness Lab (c-lab). Fellow of the Psychonomic Society. Elected member of the Committee of Psychology of the Polish Academy of Science (2020-2023). Past Director of the Institute of Psychology, Jagiellonian University (2016-2020), Past Member (2012-2017) and Past Deputy Chairman (2014-2017) of the Polish Young Academy, Polish Academy of Sciences. Past Secretary of the European Society for Cognitive Psychology Executive Committee (2010-2017) and past member of ESCoP Executive Committee (2015-2018). He worked as a visiting researcher at the CO3 Lab, Universite Libre de Bruxelles (2010-2011).

Research interest:

• theories of consciousness,
• visual awareness,
• neural correlates of consciousness,
• metacognitive awareness,
• sensory substitution,
• Video Quality of Experience.

Professor at the Institute of Psychology, Jagiellonian University.
Co-founder of C-Lab.

My main scientific interest is the scientific study of consciousness. I have done research on the temporal aspects of consciousness, in particular the neural mechanisms underlying the perception of subjective ‘now’ – a necessary part of any conscious experience. My second field of study is the diagnosis of consciousness in severe brain damage.

Research interests:

• temporal perception
• consciousness
• EEG
• fMRI

Assistant Professor at the Institute of Psychology, Jagiellonian University.

I am mainly interested in metacognition and how metacognitive feelings arise.

Research interests:

• subjective measures of consciousness
• metacognitive awareness
• the role of emotion in metacognition
• bodily awareness

Assistant Professor at the Institute of Psychology, Jagiellonian University.

Most of the time I’m preoccupied by two meta-theoretical issues, one is the relation between the mechanism identification problem and the task identification problem in cognitive psychology and the other is the relation between mechanistic and teleological descriptions of a purposeful system. Consciousness interests me because I have no idea what its function is and because I find the psychometric issues involved in studying it quite puzzling.

Research interests:

• meta-theoretical foundations of cognitive psychology
• modern (bayesian, AIT, robust) statistical methods and causal analysis (a la Pearl)
• measures of consciousness

Post-doc at the Institute of Psychology, Jagiellonian University.

Before joining the C-Lab, I completed a BBSRC-funded doctoral training program at the University of Nottingham and a BSc in Psychology with Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Leicester. In my doctoral work, supervised by Dr Jasper Robinson, I focused on the associative account of human recognition memory. During the course of my training, I have visited the lab of Dr. Nancy Carlisle (Carlisle Attention and Memory Lab, Lehigh University) where we investigated an interplay between working memory and attention. Prior to that, I worked as an RA at the Centre for Systems Neuroscience (University of Leicester), where, together with Dr Joaquin Navajas we focused on visual attention and awareness.

Research interest:

• Learning and memory
• Attention and Working Memory
• Computational cognitive neuroscience
• Neural correlates of consciousness
• Functional and structural imaging

Principal Investigator at the Institute of Psychology, Jagiellonian University.

Renate joined C-lab in 2019 with the ULAM scholarship. She obtained her doctoral degree in 2015 at the University of Tartu (supervised by Prof. Talis Bachmann). Her research had been mostly focused on the neural correlates of consciousness. After receiving her degree, Renate joined the lab of Prof. Marcello Massimini in Milan for her first postdoctoral fellowship. There she studied auditory perception in patients suffering from disorders of consciousness and how brain-based measures can inform us about the level of an individual’s conscious state. As part of C-lab Renate studies the interplay between working memory and conscious perception, and is actively involved in the SkuldNet consortium.

Research interests:

• differences between conscious and unconscious perception
• states of consciousness
• electrophysiology
• brain structure

Post-doc at the Institute of Psychology, Jagiellonian University.

The main goal of my current research is to investigate how sensory substitution devices shape subjective content of perceptual experience. I’m especially interested in phenomenology of experience during spatial representation and object recognition and enactive approach applied to studies on sensory substitution.

Research interests:

• sensory substitution
• subjective measures of consciousness
• spatial representation
• phenomenological, enactive & sensorimotor approaches
• philosophy of mind & cognitive science
• higher-order theories of consciousness

PhD at the Institute of Psychology, Jagiellonian University.

My research focuses on investigating subjective measures of awareness and the nature of transition from unconscious to conscious processing of stimuli.

Research interests:

• subjective measures of awareness
• relations between attention and consciousness
• unconscious cognitive processing
• attentional control

PhD student at the Institute of Psychology, Jagiellonian University.

PhD student at the Institute of Psychology, Jagiellonian University.

I am interested in scientific study of consciousness, its relation to attention and working memory and neural underpinnings of these processes.

Research interests:

• visual awareness
• relationship between attention and consciousness
• relationship between working memory and consciousness
• left hemisphere interpreter
• binocular rivalry

PhD candidate at Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Nijmegen, The Netherlands and at the Institute of Psychology, Jagiellonian University.

My scientific interests concentrate on consciousness and auditory domain. The main goal of my PhD research is an attempt to establish a method of diagnosing consciousness after severe brain injuries (e.g. vegetative state patients). I’m doing electrophysiology research on human (awake and asleep) and I test similar approaches on mice.

Research interests:

• different states of consciousness
• sleep
• auditory cortex

PhD student at the Institute of Psychology, Jagiellonian University.

Ever since I realized I am conscious, it has never stopped bothering me why. I try to understand the neuronal processes that underlie conscious perception and their temporal dynamics by employing methods that affect their course and metacognition. I find it intriguing, simply because these processes are the primary basis for emergence of any conscious thought we experience in life.

Research interests:

• the methodology of awareness measurement
• the influence of subliminal visual stimuli on behaviour and metacognition
• transcranial magnetic stimulation in investigation of feed-forward and feedback processes in the visual system
• the methodological aspects of non-invasive brain stimulation techniques

PhD student at the Institute of Psychology, Jagiellonian University.

In my Ph.D. I want to focus on using BCI (Brain-Computer Interface) methodology for consciousness research. Predominantly I work with neuroimaging data (EEG, fMRI) but I am always eager to learn new methods and approaches. Self-taught python user, also using R or Matlab if needed. Apart from studying consciousness, I enjoy learning about math, cosmology and visualization. But for the most part it’s brains.

Research interests:

• searching for NCC
• data analysis
• neuroimaging
• scientific programming
• statistics

PhD student at the Institute of Psychology, Jagiellonian University.

In my work I focus on intentionality and sense of agency research in health and disease. I am investigating what mechanisms undeprin action awareness, as well as what is the relation between different types of agency measures, such as temporal binding, sensory attenuation, and declarative judgements.

Research interests:

• sense of agency
• perception in action
• bodily awareness cognition in schizophrenia and psychosis
• enactive and phenomenological approaches
• philosophy of psychology and mind

PhD student at the Institute of Psychology, Jagiellonian University.

PhD student at the Institute of Psychology, Jagiellonian University.

My research concentrates on the influence of selective attention on the quality and subjective accessibility of short-term memory and working memory.

Research interests:

• the retro-cue benefit
• relationship between memory & consciousness
• bayesian approach to data analysis
• open science

Psychology student at the Institute of Psychology, Jagiellonian University. Diamond Grant recipient.

My master thesis research focuses on how multisensory integration in peripersonal space shapes our sense of self-location and body ownership, how we can manipulate these mechanisms experimentally to trigger interesting bodily illusions (e.g. heautoscopy, out of body experience, supernumerary arm illusion, magnetic touch illusion) and explore the plasticity of body representation.

I am mostly interested in extrapolations of Integrated Information Theory. In my future research I would like to verify some of its predictions and use it as a framework to investigate various qualitatively altered states of consciousness, such as psychosis, meditative states, synaesthetic experiences.

Research interests:

• integrated information theory
• circuit dynamics and cognition
• bodily self
• spatial awareness
• altered states of consciousness
• invariance in object recognition
• philosophy of information and causality

The most effective PhD student at C-Lab.

Junior researcher at C-Lab.

I’m an interdisciplinary researcher with a background in philosophy and cognitive science. My research interest circle around 4E cognition, phenomenology (applied to empirical endeavor and theoretical as well), consciousness studies and interplay between those fields. I’m passionate about philosophical underpinnings of modern theories of mind and cognition and different ways of incorporating those into science, art and technology.

Research interest:

• neurophenomenology
• cognitive science
• philosophy of mind
• enactive / embodied / extended / embedded cognition
• sensory substitution

Junior researcher at C-Lab.

PhD student at Behavioural and Social Neuroscience research group, Central European Institute of Technology (CEITEC)

My research focuses on the neurophenomenal aspects of voluntary agency (awareness of intention) and sense of agency in healthy people and patients. I am also interested in methodological pitfalls of reporting in agency research and generally in methodology of consciousness research. As a part of the ongoing collaboration with C-Lab we are investigating influence of Sense of Agency on implicit perception of spatial relationship (spatial binding). Another line of research explores a role of predictive coding in interoception on experience of agency.

Research interests:

• awareness of intention
• sense of agency
• measures of agency
• intentional binding
• predictive coding

PhD student at the Institute of Psychology, Jagiellonian University.

Currently, my research is focused on 1) the influence of subliminal stimuli on decision making and 2) the methodology of subliminal perception research. The goal of my PhD project is to delineate the limits of the influence of unconscious stimuli on decisions and reasoning.

I am also interested in many other scientific and philosophical aspects of consciousness, such as the hard problem of consciousness (why do we have consciousness?), the explanatory gap (how it is possible that a piece of meat inside our heads generates phenomenal experiences?), evolution of consciousness (does consciousness exist since the beginning of life?), or AI consciousness (can we create conscious minds? have we already created them?).

Research interests:

• unconscious perception
• critical arguments against unconscious perception
• EEG
• philosophy of mind
• philosophy of science

MA psychology graduate from Jagiellonian University.

Recently I’m writing in C#.NET a simple environment for AI experiments related (but not restricted) to consciousness. I believe modeling (thus understanding) self-organizing, associative memory is crucial in understanding the notion of meaning, which I’m primarily interested in.

Research interests:

• modelling representation in machine using self organizing maps and learning vector quantisation
• stock market prices prediction using learning vector quantization variants
• artificial grammars classification by neural networks

MSc Neurocognitive Psychology graduate from Carl-von-Ossietzky University, Oldenburg, MA student in Philosophy.

My main research interest is understanding consciousness and human will in the realm of computational cognitive neuroscience. After having been concerned with the sense of agency and the sense of ownership using EEG based BCI, I am now dealing with information theoretic as well as predicitive processing frameworks of consciousness.

Research interests:

• computational modeling
• integrated information predictive processing
• causality
• decision-making
• philosophy of mind

PhD student at Cardiff University Brain Research Imaging Centre (CUBRIC)

My ongoing collaboration with C-Lab focuses on investigating how vision can be influenced by information from other senses. In our research we use novel stimuli and combine different indicators of conscious experience: eye movements and participants’ responses. Apart from that, I am mainly interested in the role of top-down processes in visual perception. My current research aims to answer the question of how they contribute to control of eye movements in natural scenes viewing.

Research interests:

• top-down influences on visual perception
• binocular rivalry
• visual salience
• objective measures of consciousness

PhD student at the Institute of Psychology, Jagiellonian University.

My scientific interest is human experience of any kind but especially our scientific ways of acknowledge it. I’m trying to convince experimental researchers to use qualitative methodology.

Research interests:

• philosophy and methodology of science
• philosophy of mind (philosophy of mental health)
• phenomenology
• medical humanities

Doctor of Social Sciences, graduated from the Institute of Psychology, Jagiellonian University.

My research concerns perception of own body location in space. In order to investigate the problem of embodiment I use distal-to-tactile sensory substitution device (Enactive Torch), rubber-hand illusion paradigm and virtual roller coaster simulations.

Research interests:

• embodiment
• spatial navigation
• sensory substitution
• virtual reality