Hakwan Lau

NEWS: I'll be visiting UCLA for the school year 2012-2013

NEWS: Check out our new paper on attention in Nature Neuroscience!

I study why some perceptual and cognitive processes in the brain are conscious while others aren't. Currently I am an assistant professsor of psychology at Columbia University in New York City. I have previously worked at the Wellcome Center of Neuroimaging in London (2004-2007), and have done my doctorate at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar (2001-2005). I was born and raised in Hong Kong, where I studied philosophy and cognitive science as an undergrad (1998-2001).

My lab webpage is here.

Here are some papers that reflect my current thinking (for full list of references please see my CV):

Empirical Support for Higher-Order Theories of Conscious Awareness - this is published in TICS together with the philosopher David Rosenthal. sums up why the prefrontal cortex is important for awareness, and how our views differ from others

Volition and the functions of consciousness - a chapter in Gazzaniga's book that explains why current claims about functions of sensory awareness are problematic, and what we can do about it.

Are we studying consciousness yet? - my critique on the state-of-the-art, and why we should never use task performance capacity (e.g. % correct, d') as a measure of sensory awareness

Theoretical motivations for investigating the neural correlates of consciousness - a survey of some the different views currently available in the field, and reflections on why brain imaging studies on this topic may not be totally useless

A Higher-Order Bayesian Decision Theory of Perceptual Consciousness - I come to regret the title of this paper. Some must have thought "Higher-Order Bayesian" is something technically sophisticated. It is not (nothing I do is!). The "higher-order" come from "higher-order representationalism" in philosophy. This is a conceptual sketch of what I think could be a promising model that accounts for sensory awareness.

More coming soon... stay tuned.