ECSU updates (August 2026)

July was a full and happy month for the unit — a new MEXT grant on the books, a PhD defence, papers out, another accepted, and colleagues on the road.

A new MEXT grant. We're delighted that our project Can an AI agent elicit genuine social presence? was selected for SPReAD, MEXT's AI for Science exploratory program. The plan is to train behaviorally adequate artificial partners for the perceptual crossing experiment and ask whether an AI can make someone feel that another person is really there. Work is already under way in the lab. SPReAD program page

A defence. Kazuma Takada gave his PhD thesis presentation in July, to examiners in London and Tübingen, and came through it. His work on the sense of agency — parallel embodiment, multiple cursors, self-movement cognition — has run alongside outreach on touch and the brain. Revisions come next.

Time and affect. The missing timepiece appeared in BioSystems, first-authored by Luna Wang with Haruka Terauchi and Tom: how should an autonomous agent split its time between doing work and maintaining the constraints that make work possible? And Affect and Time, led by John Sykes with Francesca Fotia Sykes and Tom, landed in Cambridge's Phenomenology of Emotions — how affectivity moves the mind because it has the weight of the world behind it. (BioSystems · Affect and Time.)

Psilocybin, accepted. Good news from the Journal of Psychopharmacology: Psilocybin-induced changes in EEG link acute and long-term effects was accepted, with collaborators in Prague and at Imperial College London. Gamma-band signal diversity rises for a few hours after a dose while gamma-band power falls — less large-scale synchrony, more local processing. Details to follow.

A question about the unknown. Tom took the philosopher's seat at the IV CINET workshop in Madrid: some of what we don't know is a gap to be closed, and some of it is constitutive — measuring the unknown rather than explaining it away. He also spoke to the Qualia Structure project on information geometry and perceptual awareness.

Out and about. Brian Morrissey was at the ASET meeting in Kansas City, Milan Rybar was at NEURO 2026 in Kobe, and Tom gave seminars on agency and consciousness at the Max Planck Institutes for Mathematics in the Sciences (MiS) and for Cognitive and Brain Sciences (CBS). Closer to home, Saisha Rankaduwa's Killam visit from Dalhousie ended successfully — the DuoRhythm dataset is deposited and ready for release.

More next month.