Researcher at a glance
- Affiliation: MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit and Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge
- Orientation: Computational and predictive-processing accounts of perception and psychiatry, with a focus on how the brain estimates and mis-estimates environmental volatility — most influentially in autism, where aberrant precision-weighting of prediction errors is proposed as a core mechanism
Key contributions
- Co-author of Nord, Lawson & Dalgleish (2021), the transdiagnostic mid-insula interoception meta-analysis.
- Adults with autism overestimate the volatility of the sensory environment (Lawson, Mathys & Rees 2017, Nature Neuroscience) — a hierarchical-Bayesian result that made aberrant precision/volatility estimation a leading computational account of autistic perception, and the predictive-processing lineage she brings to the interoception paper.
- Work on disrupted habenula function in major depression (with Nord and colleagues) — the reward/punishment side of the same computational-psychiatry programme.
Key papers
Connections
- Debates: inferential?, Is interoception domain-general or organ-specific?
- Related researchers: Camilla L. Nord, Tim Dalgleish, Karl J. Friston, Klaas Enno Stephan
Cambridge cognitive neuroscientist working in the predictive-processing tradition, best known for computational accounts of how the brain estimates environmental volatility and how that estimation goes wrong — most influentially in autism, where her hierarchical-Bayesian modelling put aberrant precision-weighting of prediction errors on the map as a candidate core mechanism.
In the wiki
She is the middle author on Nord, Lawson & Dalgleish (2021), and the predictive-coding reading of that paper — the mid-insula as a site of interoceptive prediction-error encoding, with pathology framed as mis-weighted errors or over-precise priors — is squarely in her theoretical idiom. Her exteroceptive volatility work is the autism-precision story that runs parallel to the interoceptive one on computational psychosomatics and inferential?; the wiki also meets the same aberrant-precision phenotype from the visual side in Parr et al. (2019). Thin page: one paper in raw/.