Sze Chai Kwok, associate professor of cognitive neuroscience, will use NSFC funding to understand more about the brain’s metacognition processes.
By John Butcher
Staff writer
Duke Kunshan professor Sze Chai Kwok has received a four-year research grant of RMB 580,000 (US$87,600) from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) to explore the neuroscience of metacognition, or thinking about thinking.
Using the funding, Kwok aims to identify where in the brain metacognition takes place, the underlying computation, and whether the process can be regulated. His findings could have implications for the treatment of mental health conditions such as schizophrenia and autism.
Kwok’s research lies at the intersection between neuroscience and psychology. His research team studies the neural bases of episodic memory, metacognition, and other related higher cognitive processes in the primate species. In order to demystify the profound relationship between brain, mind and behaviour, Kwok is keen to employ an arsenal of methods including multimodal neuroimaging, in vivo electrophysiology and computational techniques in his research. He received a PhD degree in neuroscience from the University of Oxford.
The research will build on earlier work in which his team used neuro-imaging and neuro-modulatory techniques to identify and modulate activity in frontal and parietal regions of the brain involved in metacognition processes. The NSFC grant allows him to extend his investigation by working with data sets from studies involving macaque monkeys and psychiatric patients.
‘One example involves training macaques to learn to express their confidence level with a temporal-wagering paradigm, which measures the length of time an animal is willing to wait for a reward,’ said Kwok, associate professor of cognitive neuroscience. ‘We will then use that measurement to estimate the animal’s confidence and combine it with their task performance’ to obtain evidence of metacognitive capacity.
Kwok will split his time between his laboratory at Duke Kunshan and another in Shanghai that houses electrophysiology and behavioural testing equipment. In addition to his research team, he will provide opportunities for undergraduate students at Duke Kunshan to get involved in clinical research, data analysis and design.
His team is also collaborating with Shanghai Changning Mental Health Center and Shanghai Mental Health Center, part of the Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, with the aim of seeing whether its research can be of use in understanding and mitigating metacognitive deficits in psychiatric patients.
Kwok hopes to pinpoint where and how metacognition takes place in the brain in order to develop metacognition mind-training regimens.
‘Ultimately,’ he said, ‘this work could offer hopes of helping people with mental illness, who are often impaired in their metacognitive ability, as well as open doors to improving our learning strategies in general.’
