Origin story

Our history: We grew out of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC) community in 2022. Perceptual metacognition is the study of the subjective evaluation and control of perceptual processes. The past decade has witnessed a rapid rise in interest in perceptual metacognition amongst philosophers, neuroscientists, psychologists and computer scientists. Perceptual metacognition also has close links with the study of perceptual awareness, and has been a mainstay of presentations and symposia at ASSC over the past few years. We think the time is right for a regular meeting dedicated to this field.

Over the first three cycles the meeting has greatly grown in popularity, having drawn over 80 registrants in Amsterdam (2022), 150 registrants in New York City (2023), and 165 registrants in Tokyo (2024). With a community now boasting over 400 members from every continent worldwide, it is clear that the community craves and would dramatically benefit from targeted interface with other communities besides ASSC to develop and best support this burgeoning area of keen cross-disciplinary interest. This need has also been echoed recently across many spaces, including Bill Gates recently calling for a need for metacognition research to be more prevalent in the artificial intelligence community.