Reality Bending Lab › News › 🏆 Oliver Collins wins People's Choice Award at 2026 JRA Poster Exhibition

🏆 Oliver Collins wins People's Choice Award at 2026 JRA Poster Exhibition

2026-10-13 · Awards · Oliver Collins

Congratulations to Oliver Collins, final-year student and research assistant, who has won the People's Choice Award at the 2026 Junior Research Associate (JRA) Poster Exhibition!

Oliver's poster featured an ongoing research project exploring the relationship between visual illusions and the cardiac cycle, continuing the lab's line of work in understanding how perception and physiology shape each other.

We thank the Sussex Researcher School for their fantastic organisation of the JRA Scheme and Poster Exhibition, and send our congratulations to all the other JRA students!

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Reality Bending Lab

Exploring the neuropsychology of reality and its distortions.

The Reality Bending Lab, led by Dominique Makowski at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK, conducts world-leading research on reality perception, illusions, fake news, AI-beliefs, deception and its links with emotions, cognitive control and the Self. Using recording signals from the body (ECG, EDA…) and the brain (EEG), we analyse data using advanced modelling (Bayesian statistics, chaos theory, computational models) and develop open-source tools to improve neuropsychological science.

“Do not try to bend the spoon — that’s impossible. Instead, only try to realise the truth: there is no spoon. Then you'll see that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.”

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The Reality Bending Lab is based in the School of Psychology, at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK.

D.Makowski@sussex.ac.uk

Pevensey 1 - room 2B7, School of Psychology, University of Sussex, BN1 9QH

The University of Sussex campus in the South Downs University of Sussex crest

University of Sussex

Brighton is the sunniest city in the UK and, by some margin, its most cheerfully strange — on the sea, an hour from London. The University of Sussex sits just above it in the South Downs, and its School of Psychology is one of the largest and strongest in the country.

It is famous for its research on consciousness and interoception, with scientists like Anil Seth, Andy Clark, Zoltan Dienes and Hugo Critchley, its teaching of cutting-edge psychological methods (with stats rockstar Andy Field), its history of multidisciplinary research (arts and science), and its radical engagement in open and disruptive science.

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