Matan Mazor

Matan Mazor is a Research Fellow at All Souls College, University of Oxford, specializing in cognitive neuroscience with a focus on self simulation and self-modelling. His work bridges experimental psychology, computational modeling, and philosophical inquiry into the nature of human cognition.

His educational background includes a PhD supervised by Steve Fleming and Karl Friston at the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, University College London, where he investigated the neural and computational basis of inference about absence. Prior to this, he completed a post-doctoral position with Clare Press at Birkbeck University studying motivation and metacognition's effects on perceptual processing. He earned his MSc at Tel Aviv University as part of the Adi Lautman Interdisciplinary Programme for Outstanding Students, where his Master's thesis under Roy Mukamel used model-free fMRI analysis to investigate the internal forward model in the human brain.

Dr. Mazor's research explores how humans use mental self-models—simplified descriptions of one's cognition and perception—to control and monitor mental states, enabling efficient representation, learning, and behavioral adaptation. His work addresses fundamental questions about the cognitive benefits of self-representation, what happens when this representation is disturbed or biased, how self-representation interacts with memories of actions, and to what extent people represent their own minds beyond generic mind representations. His interdisciplinary approach combines behavioral testing, human neuroimaging, and computational modeling.

His recent publications reveal a strong focus on metacognition, confidence judgments, and the relationship between perception and self-monitoring. The research shows consistent interest in how humans distinguish reality from imagination, how confidence ratings function in different cognitive tasks, and the neural mechanisms underlying obsessive-compulsive behaviors. His work demonstrates a progression from foundational theoretical questions about self-modeling toward more clinically relevant applications in disorders affecting self-monitoring.

Dr. Mazor actively participates in the academic community through platforms like Bluesky, where he engages with colleagues on topics ranging from consciousness research to methodological issues in cognitive science. His professional network includes prominent researchers in cognitive neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy.