Rebecca K. West

Email: rebecca.west1@uq.edu.au

Supervisors

Dr. David Sewell (primary)

Dr. Natasha Matthews

Prof. Jason Mattingley

Current research

I investigate individuals’ ability to report on their internal cognitive operations, a process known as metacognition. This involves asking participants to make simple perceptual decisions and then report their confidence in the correctness of these decisions. I use a combination of psychophysics and computational modelling to understand the core properties and computations underlying such confidence reports. One of the central questions of my PhD thesis is whether, and to what extent, these confidence computations are distinct or similar across cognitive and perceptual domains.

Research interests

• Metacognition

• Decision-making

• Computational modelling

Publications

Rideaux, R.*, West, R. K.*, Wallis, T. S., Bex, P. J., Mattingley, J. B., & Harrison, W. J. (2022). Spatial structure, phase, and the contrast of natural images. Journal of Vision, 22(1):4, 1-19. https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.22.1.4

*Contributed equally

Rangelov, D., West, R., & Mattingley, J. B. (2021). Stimulus reliability automatically biases temporal integration of discrete perceptual targets in the human brain. Journal of Neuroscience, 41(36), 7662-7674. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2459-20.2021.

Conference presentations

West, R. K., Harrison, W. J., Matthews, N., Mattingley, J. B., & Sewell, D. K. (2021, April 9 -11). Comparing confidence across sensory modalities [Conference presentation]. The Australasian Experimental Psychology Society Annual Meeting, Brisbane, Australia.

West, R. K., Harrison, W. J., Matthews, N., Mattingley, J. B., & Sewell, D. K. (2020, November 26 -27). Comparing confidence across sensory modalities [Conference presentation]. Centre for Perception and Cognitive Neuroscience Annual Conference, Brisbane, Australia.