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), the Royal Society Francis Crick Medal and Lecture (2023), and election as a Fellow of the Canadian Institute of Advanced Research (2023). 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.
Postdoctoral Research Associates
Dr. Nadine Dijkstra [web] [@nadine_dijkstra]
n.dijkstra [at] ucl.ac.uk
Nadine uses a combination of neuroimaging, machine learning, computational modelling and psychophysics to study mental imagery and its relationship to perception. In her research, she tries to answer questions such as: "Do we use the same brain areas when we imagine something as when we perceive the real world?" and "how do we keep apart imagination and reality?". Nadine joined the lab in 2019 after completing her PhD in Artificial Intelligence at the Donders Institute in Nijmegen, the Netherlands and is currently working as a Senior Research Fellow at the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging.
Dr. Jason da Silva Castanheira [@jasondasilvac]
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.
Research Assistants
Nan Chen
nan-chen.22 [at] ucl.ac.uk
Nan Chen joined the MetaLab as a Research Assistant in October 2023. She is passionate about uncovering the underlying mechanisms that support perceptual awareness. Nan earned a BS with Honours from the Australian National University and an MRes in Brain Sciences from UCL & Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research. During her master’s research at UCL, Nan concentrated on understanding human adaptability to novel environments.
PhD Students
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 questions surrounding computational approaches to understand awareness, perception and how we model the world around us.
Cormac Dickson cormac.dickson.20 [at] ucl.ac.uk
Cormac began his studies with a focus on how we construct the world around us from an engineering perspective, completing 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, recently completing an MSc in Psychological Sciences at UCL. Cormac is now a Ph.D. student with the COMP2PSYCH program of the International Max Planck Research School, and his project will investigate the mechanisms supporting states of meta-awareness, i.e., awareness that you are having a particular experience, and how such states may vary in health and disease.
Benjy Barnett [web] [@benjy_barnett]
benjy.barnett.20 [at] ucl.ac.uk
Benjy Barnett completed his MSc in Intelligent and Adaptive Systems at the University of Sussex before spending two years in the Social and Cognitive Neural Sciences lab at NYU as a lab manager and research associate. Throughout his research, he has always stayed close to questions surrounding awareness, such as the relationship between awareness and face perception, and the impact of visual hallucinations on seeing patterns in noise. Benjy is now a PhD student with the Ecological Brain Project, where he will be working in the Meta Lab to explore magnitude coding systems in the brain, and whether such systems underpin awareness reports in self and other.
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 ‘Empirical tests of higher-order theories of consciousness’ project.
Affiliate Members
Dr. Marco K Wittmann [@mkwittman]
m.wittmann [at] ucl.ac.uk
Marco joined the MetaLab in 2021. His research focuses on the computational and neural mechanisms underpinning self-knowledge and social behaviour. He is particularly interested in the way the brain builds up and represents an image of one’s own actions and the actions of other people in the environment. Marco started his own lab in 2024. Visit his website for more details about his new lab and his research.
Dr. Jon Huntley [web]
j.huntley [at] ucl.ac.uk
In 2019, Jon was awarded a 4 year Wellcome fellowship to investigate awareness in Alzheimer’s disease, based at the MetaLab. The study uses a combination of fMRI, TMS-EEG, ERP and neuropsychological measures to identify markers of awareness in people with mild, moderate and advanced Alzheimer’s disease. He also has a wide range of additional research interests and expertise spanning dementia prevention, non-pharmacological interventions and clinical trials. Visit his website for more details.
Visiting researchers
Yongling Lin has joined 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 is currently working with Dr. Marco Wittmann to explore the behavioral and neural representations of a sense of self in a social group. She is also interested in how these processes are affected by mental health
Nadia Hosseinizaveh is a PhD student in cognitive science at Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, where together with Pascal Mamassian as her advisor, she is trying to investigate the role of confidence in perceptual learning. Nadia has joined the MetaLab for 6 months to investigate global aspects of metacognition under the supervision of Steve. Nadia completed her MSc in cognitive science at the university of Tehran and her BSc in clinical psychology and she is interested in perceptual decision-making and metacognition, and how these are affected by mental disorders.
Masters students
Luna Huestegge aims to investigate which factors shape our subjective experience. She completed her BSc in Psychology at University College London where she tested the limits to our visual perception of the periphery. Her research interests in visual perception and metacognition led her to enrol in the MRes in Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London. Here, using non-invasive brain stimulation, she is now investigating how we dissociate imagination from reality with Nadine and Cristina.
Cristina Uribe got her BA in Psychology from Chapman University and is currently pursuing a Dual Masters in Mind and Brain Sciences at UCL and Sorbonne. She previously worked at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Brain and Behavioral Sciences in California. There, her research with Dr. Aaron Schurger encompassed validating the threshold of conscious visual perception and investigating the mechanisms underlying social cognition. Presently, she works 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.
Tianqi Zhan completed a Bachelor of Science in Neural Science at New York University Shanghai where she used behavioral and EEG measurements to study the impact of action on perceptual learning. She seeks to understand action control and monitoring processes across levels, as well as how action interacts with and supports various functions. Recently, she has been particularly intrigued by the ability to evaluate one’s performance through metacognition. This fascination has motivated her to work with Marco on her Masters project to study metacognition under social contexts.
James Knight completed an MEng in Mathematics and Computer Science at Imperial College London before spending some time working as a Research Engineer in the software industry. He is interested in understanding the neural basis of subjective experience, with a particular focus on using mathematical techniques from areas such as Bayesian Statistics, Dynamical Systems Theory and Information Theory to develop empirically testable computational models. James' Masters project focuses on modelling the temporal dynamics of conscious awareness to understand how detection and discrimination confidence is influenced by prior observations.
Alumni
Dr. Sucharit Katyal completed a postdoc in the MetaLab investigating the possibilities and mechanisms of metacognitive training.
Dr. Clara Colombatto completed a postdoc in the MetaLab studying social perception, with a special focus on the interplay between metacognition and social cognition.
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.
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 now holds an independent Sir Henry Wellcome Fellowship and in 2023 will start 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 is now a PhD student 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
Princeton University
Nathaniel Daw
UCLA
Hakwan Lau
University of Zurich
Klaas Stephan
UCL
Peter Kok Ray Dolan Patrick Haggard Benedetto de Martino Nicholas Wright Anthony David
PKU
Jian Li
Beijing Normal University
Xiao Hu
Aix Marseille Université
Thibault Gajdos Karen Davranche
Trinity College Dublin
Claire Gillan
Aarhus University
Micah Allen
Mount Sinai Hospital
Scott Moeller
McGill University, Montreal
Ross Otto
Northeastern University
Jorge Morales
Kings College London
Francesca Happé Gareth Owen
Virginia Tech
Read Montague
University of Oxford
Ingmar Posner Nick Hawes