Dr Samuel Recht

Profile details

 

Departmental Lecturer in Biological Sciences

Director of Studies in Natural Sciences

Biography

Dr Samuel Recht is a cognitive scientist whose research focuses on how people think about their own thinking. His work investigates how attention, memory, and confidence interact to shape curiosity about the world and influence learning.

He holds a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience and Psychology (2019) and joined the University of Oxford in 2020 as a Fyssen Research Fellow within the Department of Experimental Psychology and University College. Since 2022, he has been a Lecturer at Pembroke College, and in January 2026 he was appointed Departmental Lecturer in Biological Sciences at Oxford Lifelong Learning.

As Director of Studies in Natural Sciences, Sam oversees the strategic development and coordination of the curriculum for accredited courses across the physical and biological sciences.

Research interests

Sam’s research focuses on higher-order cognition, examining how individuals evaluate and regulate their own mental states and behaviour. His work explores how people assess the quality of their decisions and how these metacognitive evaluations guide learning and adaptive behaviour. To investigate these processes, he employs a range of methods including behavioural experiments (both online and in-lab computer-based tasks), eye-tracking, and neuroimaging.

His research group studies how metacognition operates across perceptual, social, and technological contexts, and how attention and working memory support these processes.

Sam’s research areas include:

  • The dynamics of curiosity and its role in learning
  • The role of metacognition and trust in adaptive decision-making
  • The behavioural and neural bases of attention and memory in humans
  • How individuals calibrate trust in AI systems, including large language models

He welcomes enquiries from prospective DPhil (PhD) applicants interested in these areas and is also available to discuss project supervision with undergraduate and master’s students, including those from other departments.

 

Selected publications

Recht, S., Li, C., Yang, Y. and Chiu, K., 2025. Adaptive curiosity about metacognitive ability. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

Recht, S., Jovanovic, L., Mamassian, P. and Balsdon, T., 2022. Confidence at the limits of human nested cognition. Neuroscience of consciousness, 2022(1), p.niac014.

Recht, S., de Gardelle, V. and Mamassian, P., 2021. Metacognitive blindness in temporal selection during the deployment of spatial attention. Cognition, 216, p.104864.

Recht, S., Mamassian, P. and De Gardelle, V., 2019. Temporal attention causes systematic biases in visual confidence. Scientific Reports, 9(1), p.11622.