Principal Investigator
Prof. Stephen Fleming [cv] [@smfleming]
stephen.fleming [at] ucl.ac.uk
Steve Fleming is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and Royal Society/Wellcome Sir Henry Dale Fellow at the Department of Experimental Psychology, University College London, Group Leader at the Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry, and Principal Investigator at the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, where he leads the Metacognition Group. He studied Psychology and Physiology at the University of Oxford before completing his PhD at UCL and postdoctoral studies at New York University. Steve’s work aims to understand the mechanisms supporting human subjective experience and metacognition by employing a combination of psychophysics, brain imaging and computational modelling. This research has been recognised by awards including the British Academy Wiley Prize in Psychology (2016), a Philip Leverhulme Prize in Psychology (2018), the British Psychological Society Spearman Medal (2019), election as a Fellow of the Canadian Institute of Advanced Research (2023), and the Royal Society Francis Crick Medal and Lecture (2024). He was a previous Executive Director of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (2014-2020) and is an editor at the journals PNAS Nexus and Mind and Language. He writes widely for a general audience, including articles for Aeon, New Scientist and Scientific American, and is the author of Know Thyself (2021), a trade book on the science of metacognition.
Affiliate PIs
Dr. Marco K Wittmann [@mkwittman] [lab]
m.wittmann [at] ucl.ac.uk
Marco joined the MetaLab in 2021. His research focuses on the neural underpinnings of reasoning about ourselves and others, and how the brain navigates intricate social situations involving multiple people. Marco’s aim is to understand the different dimensions of social representations in various contexts, and how we adapt our mental strategies to social settings. Marco is now MRC Career Development Fellow and PI at Experimental Psychology at UCL, where he started his own lab in 2024. Visit his website for more details about his new lab and his research.
Lab Manager
Sarah Kalwarowsky
s.kalwarowsky [at] ucl.ac.uk
Sarah joined the MetaLab in February 2024 as Research Project Manager. She completed her B.Sc. (hons) in Life Sciences and her M.Sc. in Neuroscience at Queen’s University in Canada before moving to the United Kingdom in 2011. Since then, she has worked on a wide range of research projects at UCL, Birkbeck, Imperial College London and the University of Hertfordshire. She is currently working as Research Project Manager on the Templeton World Charity Foundation funded ‘ETHOS - Empirical Tests of Higher-Order theories of consciousnesS’ project.
Postdoctoral Research Associates
Dr. Jason da Silva Castanheira [@jasondasilvac] j.castanheira [at] ucl.ac.uk
Jason uses a combination of cutting-edge neurophysiological methods, machine learning, and computational modelling to study how the brain selects information from our surroundings. His research interests range from attention and conscious perception, to inter-individual differences and neurophysiological methods. Jason joined the lab in 2024 as a Research Fellow at the Department of Experimental Psychology, UCL after completing his Ph.D. in Neuroscience at the Montreal Neurological Institute, McGill University.
Dr. Kevin O'Neill [https://kevingoneill.github.io] [@kevingoneill] kevin.o'neill [at] ucl.ac.uk
Kevin studies how we reason about causal and counterfactual relationships, and likewise how we metacognitively evaluate this kind of reasoning. In his research, Kevin uses a mixture of methods from cognitive psychology, computational modeling, and experimental philosophy. Kevin joined the lab as a Research Fellow in the Department of Experimental Psychology in 2024 after completing his PhD in Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University.
Dr. Benjy Barnett [web] [@benjy_barnett]
benjy.barnett.20 [at] ucl.ac.uk
Benjy is interested in how the brain represents different kinds of absences - from low-level perceptual absences to conceptual absences like the number zero. He studies whether the brain relies on one representation of absence that is shared across these two different domains - and moreover whether cognitive representations of absence are distinct from those reflecting presence. Benjy completed his PhD in the MetaLab in 2024 and is staying on to further explore these questions and others related to the neuroscience of conscious experience.
Visiting Researchers
Hélenè Van Marcke
helene.vanmarcke [at] kuleuven.be
Hélène completed her MSc in Theoretical and Experimental Psychology at Ghent University (Belgium). She is currently pursuing a PhD with Prof. Kobe Desender at the KU Leuven, investigating the role of prior beliefs and higher-order confidence in metacognition using a combination of behavioural and computational methods. During a 5-month research visit at the MetaLab, she will work in close collaboration with Prof. Fleming to uncover the longitudinal aspects and intricate interactions between confidence in decisions, tasks and the self.
PhD Students
Cormac Dickson cormac.dickson.20 [at] ucl.ac.uk
Cormac completed his BAI and subsequently MAI in Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering at Trinity College Dublin, before working as a design engineer in the energy sector. Since then, a growing interest in how our perception of reality itself is constructed motivated a change in direction towards the brain sciences and a MSc in Psychological Sciences at UCL. Cormac is a Ph.D. student with the COMP2PSYCH program of the International Max Planck Research School, and is investigating relationships between mind-wandering, inference and mental health.
Martha Cottam martha.cottam.23 [at] ucl.ac.uk
Martha completed her MSc at Imperial College London in Translational Neuroscience where she focused on methodological developments of neuroimaging and applications to psychedelic research. Her interdisciplinary approach led to both a placement in Japan to work on the development of a Brain-computer-interface in Robotics and over 2 years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry. She is now a LIDo PhD student interested in computational approaches to understand awareness, perception and how we model the world around us.
Tianqi Zhan tianqi.zhan.23 [at] ucl.ac.uk
Tianqi completed her MRes in Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL, where she worked with Marco on a project studying metacognition in social contexts. She has now joined the lab as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Trainee Fellow as part of the CODE Doctoral Network on metacognition. Her PhD research focuses on understanding how metacognition relates to information-seeking and cognitive offloading, and the factors that influence these processes.
Richard O’Farrell richard.o'farrell.22 [at] ucl.ac.uk
Richard completed his MSc in Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL, where he investigated how we ‘offload’ or store information in our environment via digital tools. After a brief Research Assistant position in University of Sussex’s Representational Systems Lab, he joined the MetaLab in 2024 as a PhD student examining the timescale of conscious perception – specifically, what the temporal resolution of awareness can tell us about its adaptive function.
Joel Vasama joel.vasama.24 [at] ucl.ac.uk
Joel is interested in the mechanisms for how we understand others and ourselves. Picking up a background in Psychology (King’s College London) and Neuroscience (MSc Uni of Tübingen), Joel’s often studies (dys)function at a neural and behavioral level using neurocognitive modelling. Joining the lab in 2024 as a PhD student in the IMPRS COMP2PSYCH program, in his PhD Joel hopes to explore interactions in self-other representations in social interaction, and how changes in the self, for example, due to mental illness, influence this process.
Alumni
Dr. Nadine Dijkstra completed a post-doc with the MetaLab focusing on the relationship between mental imagery and perception. Nadine started her own lab in 2024.
Cristina Uribe completed her MSc with Dr. Nadine Dijkstra on a project focused on using TMS to make imagination feel real. Her primary academic interest lies in unraveling the intricacies of how the brain gives rise to consciousness and subjective experiences.
Luna Huestegge completed her MRes in Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London. Using non-invasive brain stimulation, she investigated how we dissociate imagination from reality with Nadine and Cristina.
James Knight completed his Masters project in the lab, focusing on modelling the temporal dynamics of conscious awareness to understand how detection and discrimination confidence is influenced by prior observations.
Nadia Hosseinizaveh joined the lab as a visiting PhD student. She has now resumed her PhD in cognitive science at Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris where she is trying to investigate the role of confidence in perceptual learning.
Yongling Lin was a visiting researcher to the lab from Beijing Normal University in 2022, funded by a China Scholarship Council Award as a part of her PhD investigating social cognition. She has now joined Dr. Marco Wittmann’s lab.
Nan Chen worked as a research assistant in the MetaLab focussing on understanding human adaptability to novel environments. She is now beginning her PhD in Germany.
Dr. Sucharit Katyal completed a postdoc in the MetaLab investigating the possibilities and mechanisms of metacognitive training. He is now at the University of Copenhagen.
Dr. Clara Colombatto completed a postdoc in the MetaLab studying social perception, with a special focus on the interplay between metacognition and social cognition. She is now faculty at the University of Waterloo.
Thomas von Rein completed his master’s research alongside Nadine, focusing on neuroimaging of the interaction between perception and imagination.
Florencia Calderón completed her Masters project in the MetaLab working with Benjy to study social cognition with OP-MEG. She is a now a PhD student at the Max Planck School of Cognition.
Astrid Lund visited the lab from King’s College London to investigate domain-generality in metacognition. She is currently completing her PhD with Dr. Charlotte Russell.
Kostya Koleda completed his Master's research project in the lab, working on extending out the higher-order state space model to accommodate perceptual reality monitoring.
Alexane Leclerc completed her Masters' dissertation (part of the dual masters in Brain and Mind Sciences) supervised by Dr. Nadine Dijkstra on imagery vividness and perceptual reality monitoring.
Andrew McWilliams was a clinical research fellow and PhD candidate on the Wellcome-funded Mental Health and Justice project (https://mhj.org.uk/), co-supervised by Steve, Anthony David (UCL) and Gareth Owen (KCL). His PhD explored the role of metacognition in decision-making capacity.
Dan Bang was one of the first postdocs in the MetaLab, joining us in 2015. He studied the neural basis of decision confidence and how it is modulated by social context, and spearheaded a collaboration with Read Montague and Ken Kishida to measure neurotransmitter fluctuations during human perceptual decision-making. Dan went on to hold an independent Sir Henry Wellcome Fellowship and in 2023 started his own lab at Aarhus University.
Yuena Zheng completed her Masters project investigating how different regions in frontal and parietal cortex work together to support decision confidence formation, together with Dr Dan Bang.
Elisa van der Plas completed her PhD in the MetaLab under the supervision of Steve and Prof. Anthony David. Her project was part of the interdisciplinary Mental Health and Justice initiative, and investigated what roles metacognition and social influence play in decision capacity.
William Turner visited the lab during his PhD project at the University of Melbourne under the supervision of Stefan Bode.
Oliver Warrington was a research assistant at the MetaLab from 2019-2020. He is now pursuing a PhD with Peter Kok, studying computational mechanisms of perception.
Nadim Atiya was a postdoc with the MetaLab and the Max Planck UCL Computational Psychiatry Centre. He investigated how disorders of mental health can affect the neural circuit dynamics underlying decisions and confidence estimates. Nadim is now a Lead Machine Learning Engineer at ZILO.
Lion Schulz was a MSc student in the MetaLab who investigated how individual differences in metacognitive ability and information seeking relate to political beliefs, together with Max Rollwage. Lion went on to complete a PhD with Peter Dayan at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics.
Roy Tal Dew completed his Masters project in the lab, as part of the Dual Masters in Brain and Mind Sciences at UCL. He worked with Matan Mazor to investigate the neural representations of stimulus absence.
Chudi Gong completed her Masters project in the lab exploring the distinct neural representations of confidence in detection and discrimination tasks, together with Matan Mazor. Chudi is now an RA at Beijing Normal University.
Marion Rouault was a postdoc in the Metacognition Group between 2015 and 2019. She investigated how global beliefs about our skills and abilities are constructed from local confidence signals at behavioural, computational and neural levels, and how these processes are distorted in disorders of mental health. In 2023 Marion started her own lab as a tenured CNRS PI at the Paris Brain Institute.
Matan Mazor completed his Ph.D. in the MetaLab, supervised by Steve and Prof. Karl Friston, in which investigated the neural and computational basis of inference about absence, and its relation to self-modelling. Matan now holds a postdoctoral fellowship at All Souls’ College, Oxford.
Max Rollwage completed his PhD with the MetaLab as part of the IMPRS COMP2PSYCH programme, and supervised by Steve and Ray Dolan. He investigated the link between metacognition, confidence and political beliefs. Max is now a Head of Research, Development and AI at Limbic.
Keer Dong was a Cognitive Neuroscience MRes student who worked with the Elisa van der Plas and Peking University in China to understand cross-cultural influences on decision-making and confidence.
Xiao Hu visited the lab during 2017-2018 from Beijing Normal University, funded by a China Scholarship Council Award as part of his PhD on metamemory.
Alisa Loosen completed her Masters project in the lab, as part of the Dual Masters in Brain and Mind Sciences at UCL and ENS/UPMC. She worked with Max Rollwage on the effects of confidence on changes of mind. Alisa went on to complete a PhD on the IMPRS COMP2PSYCH programme and is now a postdoc at Mount Sinai School of Medicine.
Juliana Sporrer completed her Masters project in the lab as part of the Dual Masters in Brain and Mind Sciences at UCL. She investigated how expectations and rewards impact confidence and its relationship with mood at behavioural and computational levels. Juliana is now a PhD student on the IMPRS COMP2PSYCH programme.
Sara Ershadmanesh visited the MetaLab on a scholarship from the Cognitive Science and Technologies council in 2018-19, and worked with Dan Bang to develop computational models of the effects of context on metacognitive judgments. She is now a postdoc in Peter Dayan’s group at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics.
Rylan Schaeffer completed his Cognitive Neuroscience MRes at UCL in the MetaLab, working on the effects of belief stability on confidence estimates. He is now a Data Scientist at Uber.
Jason Carpenter was a research assistant in the lab from 2015-2017, managing our R01-funded collaboration with Hakwan Lau at UCLA. He is now a Machine Learning Engineer at AI consulting company Manifold.
Oriane Armand completed her MSc in Advanced Neuroimaging in the MetaLab, working on motor contributions to metacognition. She is now a PhD student in Ophelia Deroy’s group at the Munich Center for Neurosciences, LMU.
Tricia Seow graduated from the MSci in Neuroscience at UCL and was a research assistant in the lab from 2015-2017. Tricia then went on to complete her PhD in Claire Gillan’s group at Trinity College Dublin, and is now a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research.
Steven Chau completed his medical training in psychiatry before joining the MSc in Neuroscience programme at UCL. His thesis focused on developing single-trial estimates of metacognitive efficiency.
Shaima Alsuwaidi studied for a Bachelors in Chemical Engineering before joining the MSc in Neuroscience programme at UCL. She completed her thesis with Marion Rouault, working on how prior experience affects confidence estimates.
Collaborators
Exeter University
Jonathan Huntley
Paris Brain Institute
Marion Rouault
UCLA
Hakwan Lau
University of Zurich
Klaas Stephan
UCL
Peter Kok Ray Dolan Benedetto de Martino Anthony David
Beijing Normal University
Xiao Hu
Trinity College Dublin
Claire Gillan
Aarhus University
Micah Allen
Mount Sinai Hospital
Scott Moeller
McGill University, Montreal
Ross Otto
Northeastern University
Jorge Morales
University of Oxford
Ingmar Posner Nick Hawes