About
Steve Fleming is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL, where he leads the Metacognition Group. His research focuses on understanding the relationship between objective measures (behaviour and brain activity) and subjective experience.
He is interested in both metacognition – what people think or know about their own minds – and consciousness – our ever-changing subjective experience. He is pursuing a hypothesis that there are intimate links between both metacognition and consciousness, as formalized in computational frameworks such as the higher-order state space model. Much of the research in the lab uses computational models to develop predictions about how subjective variables (such as confidence and awareness reports) vary together with neural and behavioral measures.
Fleming is also interested in the implications of this research for clinical conditions characterized by distortions in (self-)awareness and metacognition – including affective disorders, dementia and psychosis. He collaborates with clinician colleagues on these questions.
Awards
- Spearman Medal, British Psychological Society, 2019
- Philip Leverhulme Prize in Psychology, Leverhulme Trust, 2018
- Wiley Prize in Psychology, British Academy, 2016
- William James Prize, ASSC, 2012
Relevant Publications
- Fleming, S. M. (2020). Awareness as inference in a higher-order state space. Neuroscience of Consciousness, 2020(1), niz020.
- Rouault, M., Seow, T., Gillan, C. M., & Fleming, S. M. (2018). Psychiatric symptom dimensions are associated with dissociable shifts in metacognition but not task performance. Biological Psychiatry, 84(6), 443-451.
- Fleming, S.M. & Daw, N.D. (2017) Self-evaluation of decision-making: A general Bayesian framework for metacognitive computation. Psychological Review, 124(1): 91-114
- Fleming, S.M., Ryu, J., Golfinos, J.G. & Blackmon, K.E. (2014) Domain-specific impairment in metacognitive accuracy following anterior prefrontal lesions. Brain, 137 (10): 2811-2822
- Fleming, S.M., Weil, R.S., Nagy, Z., Dolan, R.J. & Rees, G. (2010) Relating introspective accuracy to individual differences in brain structure. Science, 329 (5998): 1541-43
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