People

Dr Daniel Yon (Head)

I am a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) and Head 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, took up my first permanent position in 2019. In 2021, I joined the faculty at Birkbeck and moved the lab here.

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.

Helen Olawole-Scott (PhD student)

I am a PhD student in the Uncertainty Lab supervised by Daniel (Birkbeck) and Rebecca Chamberlain (Goldsmiths). My PhD is funded by the ESRC.

I completed my MSc in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Amsterdam , where I worked on two main research projects: one focused on detecting local sleep patterns using EEG and another which attempted to bias spatial attention using tDCS. I then went on to work as a research assistant at the University of Cambridge on the BabyRhythm project which studies neural and motor entrainment to auditory stimuli in infants and how this could be related to their later language development. In my PhD, I am using a multi-method approach to characterise the cognitive and neural mechanisms that underpin meta-level beliefs about the reliability of our senses (e.g.,).

George Blackburne (Research Assistant)

I am a Research Assistant studying the computations underpinning our sense of agency. This involves using tools from psychophysics and mathematical modelling to show how the cognitive capacity to track contingency between volitional action and worldly effects differs across the psychological spectrum.

I’m also based at UCL where I work on the neural mechanisms responsible for different global modes of consciousness, such as under the influence of psychedelic drugs or general anaesthesia.

Elisa La Chiusa (Research Assistant)

I am a research assistant working in the Uncertainty Lab, supervised by Daniel.

I worked with the lab during my BSc in Psychology at Birkbeck, and I am currently leading on a project investigating how different kinds of uncertainty influence metacognition and information seeking action.

Einar Andreassen (Research Assistant)

I am a research assistant working in the Uncertainty Lab, supervised by Daniel.

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.

Georgie Edwards-Lowe (Research Assistant)

I am an MSc student at Birkbeck and a research assistant in the Uncertainty Lab, supervised by Daniel.

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.

Nora Happel (Research Assistant)

I completed my MSc dissertation in the Uncertainty Lab – investigating how perceptual predictions are formed, and how this process may be different in autism.

I am still working with the Lab, now as a research assistant, where I am leading on new work looking at how we form predictions about the reliability of our percepts, and how these mechanisms are connected to unusual experiences (e.g,. hearing voices).