Dr Daniel Yon (Head)
I am a Reader (Associate Professor) in Cognitive Neuroscience and Director of the Uncertainty Lab at Birkbeck, University of London.
I studied Psychology at Oxford before moving to Birkbeck for doctoral training in 2014. I received my PhD in 2018, and took up my first permanent position in 2019 before joining the faculty at Birkbeck in 2021. For 2023-34, I was also a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study, Paris.
Research in my lab combines tools from experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience to study how the mind and brain forms perceptions, actions and beliefs.
If you’re interested in joining the group or working with us, please feel free to get in touch.
Benjy Barnett (Postdoctoral Researcher)
I joined the Uncertainty Lab as a Postdoctoral Researcher in 2025. My work focuses on the impact that social interactions have on our perceptual experiences and metacognition – does sharing another’s perspective change the way we see the world? To answer this, I use a combination of neuroimaging, psychophysics, and computational modelling.
Before joining the lab, I was a PhD student and post doc in the MetaLab at UCL, where I led work on the perception and conception of absences, mental imagery, and neural correlates of consciousness in Alzheimer’s patients.
Helen Olawole-Scott (Postdoctoral Researcher)
I joined the Uncertainty Lab as a PhD student with Daniel in 2021, funded by the ESRC. In my doctoral work, I used a multi-method approach (e.g., psychophysics, computational modelling, fMRI) to characterise the cognitive and neural mechanisms that underpin meta-level beliefs about the reliability of our senses (e.g.,).
In 2024, I continued working in the lab as Postdoctoral Research Fellow funded by a Wellcome ISSF Award. Here, I have been working on extending the same ideas to understanding unusual experiences (like hallucinations).
Before joining the lab I completed an MSc at the University of Amsterdam and worked as a Research Assistant at the University of Cambridge on the BabyRhythm project.
Georgie Edwards-Lowe (PhD student)
I am a PhD student in the Uncertainty Lab, supervised by Daniel and Ori Ossmy. My PhD is funded by the ESRC.
Currently, I am leading on a project that combines ideas from metacognition and reinforcement learning to investigate how we form and update models about our own abilities – using a combination of behavioural experiments, neuroimaging (fMRI) and computational models.
Before that, I was an MSc student and research assistant in the lab, where I led work looking at how different kinds of uncertainty affect metacognition and information seeking (e.g.,)
Krisztina Jedlovszky (PhD Student)
I am a PhD student on UCL-Birkbeck MRC training programme, jointly supervised by Daniel and Jeremy Skipper (UCL). My PhD is focusing on using behavioural experiments, computational modelling, neuroimaging and psychedelics to understand the cognitive basis of mental health symptoms – with a particular interest in rumination.
Previously in the lab, I worked on a rotation project am working using behavioural experiments and reinforcement learning models to investigate expectations about volatility and their connection to unusual states like paranoia (e.g.,)
Maia Armstrong (PhD Student)
I am a PhD student on the LIDo BBSRC-funded DTP, supervised by Silvia Seghezzi and Daniel Yon. My research focuses on developing novel behavioural and neuroimaging (i.e., EEG, fMRI) paradigms to understand how counterfactual thoughts, actions and memories are represented in the mind and brain.
In the Uncertainty Lab, I have also used fMRI and computational modelling to investigate how our brains respond to actual and expected volatility in our environment. Before joining the lab, I completed an MSci in Neuroscience at UCL in 2024.
Jessye Clarke (PhD Student)
I am a PhD student under the supervision of Clare Press and Daniel Yon investigating the role of expectations in shaping perception.
I completed a BA and MSci in Philosophy and Natural Sciences respectively at the University of Cambridge in 2022. After this, I completed an MSc in Neuroscience at the LMU in Munich under a DAAD scholarship, undertaking a master thesis on the neural correlates of conscious visual perception under the supervision of Claire Sergent in Paris.
Einar Andreassen (Research Assistant)
I worked with The Uncertainty Lab during my MSc in Psychology at Birkbeck. Right now, I am leading on a project that explores how interacting with other people might change our beliefs about our own minds (e.g.,).
Lab alumni
George Blackburne (2022-23)
George worked was Research Assistant in the Uncertainty Lab on a project funded by the Wellcome Trust, investigating the sense of control (e.g.,) and its disruption across the psychiatric spectrum. After working in the Lab, George moved on to a PhD at UCL’s Department of Experimental Psychology.