Stephen M Fleming

• PhD
• Principal Investigator at University College London

Humans are able to imagine scenarios that are decoupled from the current environment by internally activating perceptual representations. While an efficient re-use of existing resources, it remains unknown how human observers classify perceptual signals as reflecting external reality, as opposed to internal simulation or imagination. Here we show t...

Accounting for why discrimination between different perceptual contents is not always accompanied by conscious detection of that content remains a challenge for predictive processing theories of perception. Here, we test a hypothesis that detection is supported by a distinct inference within generative models of perceptual content. We develop a nov...

Theories of consciousness have a long and controversial history. One well-known proposal — integrated information theory — has recently been labeled as ‘pseudoscience’, which has caused a heated open debate. Here we discuss the case and argue that the theory is indeed unscientific because its core claims are untestable even in principle.

Metacognitive biases are characteristic of common mental health disorders like depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). However, recent transdiagnostic approaches consistently contradict traditional clinical studies, with overconfidence in perception among highly compulsive individuals versus underconfident memory in OCD patients. To rec...

Humans use similar brain systems to both imagine and perceive. While the re-use of brain systems specialised for sensory perception for offline simulation is an efficient use of resources, it also leads to a potential for confusions between imagination and reality. It remains unknown how human observers classify perceptual signals as reflecting ext...

Humans are able to imagine scenarios that are decoupled from the current environment by internally activating perceptual representations. While an efficient re-use of existing resources, it remains unknown how human observers classify perceptual signals as reflecting external reality, as opposed to internal simulation or imagination. Here we show t...

Perceptual reality monitoring refers to the ability to distinguish internally triggered imagination from externally triggered reality. Such monitoring can take place at perceptual or cognitive levels-for example, in lucid dreaming, perceptual experience feels real but is accompanied by a cognitive insight that it is not real. We recently developed...

Psychological therapies are among the most effective treatments for common mental health problems—however, we still know relatively little about how exactly they improve symptoms. Here, we demonstrate the power of combining theory with computational methods to parse effects of different components of cognitive-behavioral therapies onto underlying m...

Some conscious experiences are more vivid than others. Although perceptual vividness is a key component of human consciousness, how variation in this magnitude property is registered by the human brain is unknown. A striking feature of neural codes for magnitude in other psychological domains such as number or reward is that the magnitude property...

According to previous research, the accuracy of metacognitive judgments in aging depends on the cognitive domain involved in the task, the experimental design, and the metacognitive index used. Older adults are frequently less accurate than younger adults in judging their episodic memory, while no difference is typically observed for semantic metam...

The media, including news articles in both Nature and Science, have recently celebrated the Integrated Information Theory (IIT) as a ‘leading’ and empirically tested theory of consciousness. We are writing as researchers with some relevant expertise to express our concerns.

When making discrimination decisions between two stimulus categories, subjective confidence judgments are more positively affected by evidence in support of a decision than negatively affected by evidence against it. Recent theoretical proposals suggest that this “positive evidence bias” may be due to observers adopting a detection-like strategy wh...

Numerous disorders are characterised by fatigue as a highly disabling symptom. Fatigue plays a particularly important clinical role in multiple sclerosis (MS) where it exerts a profound impact on quality of life. Recent concepts of fatigue grounded in computational theories of brain-body interactions emphasise the role of interoception and metacogn...

Previously, we identified a subset of regions where the relation between decision confidence and univariate functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) activity was quadratic, with stronger activation for both high and low compared with intermediate levels of confidence. We further showed that, in a subset of these regions, this quadratic modulati...

Psychological therapies are among the most effective treatments for a range of common mental health problems - however, we still know relatively little about how exactly they improve symptoms. Here, we demonstrate the power of combing theory with computational methods to parse effects of different components of cognitive-behavioural therapies on to...

Humans are voracious imaginers, with internal simulations supporting memory, planning and decision-making. Because the neural mechanisms supporting imagery overlap with those supporting perception, a foundational question is how reality and imagination are kept apart. One possibility is that the intention to imagine is used to identify and discount...

The metacognitive sense of confidence can play a critical role in regulating decision making. In particular, a lack of confidence can justify the explicit, potentially costly, instrumental acquisition of extra information that might resolve uncertainty. Human confidence is highly complex, and recent computational work has suggested a statistically...

Metacognition refers to a capacity to reflect on and control other cognitive processes, commonly quantified as the extent to which confidence tracks objective performance. There is conflicting evidence about how "local" metacognition (monitoring of individual judgments) and "global" metacognition (estimates of self-performance) change across the li...

Accounting for why sensitivity to perceptual input (as assayed by discrimination judgments) is not always accompanied by conscious awareness (as assayed by detection judgments) remains a challenge for predictive processing theories of perception. Here we test a hypothesis that awareness is supported by higher-order inferences within generative mode...

Updating one’s beliefs about the causes and effects of climate change is crucial for altering attitudes and behaviours. Importantly, metacognitive abilities - insight into the (in)correctness of one’s beliefs- play a key role in the formation of polarised beliefs. We here aimed at investigated the role of metacognition in changing beliefs about cli...

Numerous disorders are characterised by fatigue as a highly disabling symptom. Fatigue plays a particularly important clinical role in multiple sclerosis (MS) where it exerts a profound impact on quality of life. Recent concepts of fatigue grounded in computational theories of brain-body interactions emphasise the role of interoception and metacogn...

Some conscious experiences are more vivid than others. Although perceptual vividness is a key component of human consciousness, how variation in this magnitude property is registered by the human brain is unknown. A striking feature of magnitudes in other psychological domains, such as number or reward, is the existence of neural magnitude codes th...

When making discrimination decisions between two stimulus categories, subjective confidence judgments are more positively affected by evidence in support of a decision than negatively affected by evidence against it. Recent theoretical proposals suggest that this “positive evidence bias” may be due to observers adopting a detection-like strategy wh...

Previously, we identified a subset of regions where the relation between decision confidence and univariate fMRI activity was quadratic, with stronger activation for both high and low compared to intermediate levels of confidence. We further showed that, in a subset of these regions, this quadratic modulation appeared only for confidence in detecti...

Why people do or do not change their beliefs has been a long-standing puzzle. Sometimes people hold onto false beliefs despite ample contradictory evidence; sometimes they change their beliefs without sufficient reason. Here, we propose that the utility of a belief is derived from the potential outcomes associated with holding it. Outcomes can be i...

Some aspects of human metacognition, such as the ability to consciously evaluate our beliefs and decisions, are hypothesized to be culturally acquired. However, direct evidence for this claim is lacking. As an initial step toward answering this question, here we examine differences in metacognitive performance between populations matched for occupa...

Computing confidence in one’s own and others’ decisions is critical for social success. While there has been substantial progress in our understanding of confidence estimates about oneself, little is known about how people form confidence estimates about others. Here, we address this question by asking participants undergoing fMRI to place bets on...

Despite the tangible progress in psychological and cognitive sciences over the last several years, these disciplines still trail other more mature sciences in identifying the most important questions that need to be solved. Reaching such consensus could lead to greater synergy across different laboratories, faster progress, and increased focus on s...

High self-esteem, an overall positive evaluation of self-worth, is a cornerstone of mental health. Previously we showed that people with low self-esteem differentially construct beliefs about momentary self-worth derived from social feedback. However, it remains unknown whether these anomalies extend to constructing beliefs about self-performance i...

Conscious experiences involve subjective qualities, such as colours, sounds, smells and emotions. In this Perspective, we argue that these subjective qualities can be understood in terms of their similarity to other experiences. This account highlights the role of memory in conscious experience, even for simple percepts. How an experience feels dep...

As a general rule, if it is easy to detect a target in a visual scene, it is also easy to detect its absence. To account for this, models of visual search explain search termination as resulting either from counterfactual reasoning over second-order representations of search efficiency, automatic extraction of ensemble statistics of a display, or h...

Metacognition refers to a capacity to reflect on and control other cognitive processes, commonly quantified as the extent to which confidence tracks objective performance. There is conflicting evidence about how metacognition changes across the lifespan and it is unknown whether “local” metacognition (monitoring of individual judgments) and “global...

Functional cognitive disorder is common but underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. Metacognition, an individual's ability to reflect on and monitor cognitive processes, is likely to be relevant. Local metacognition refers to an ability to estimate confidence in cognitive performance on a moment-to-moment basis, whereas global metacognition...

Internally generated imagery and externally triggered perception rely on overlapping sensory processes. This overlap poses a challenge for perceptual reality monitoring: determining whether sensory signals reflect reality or imagination. In this study, we used psychophysics to investigate how imagery and perception interact to determine visual expe...

A key goal of consciousness science is identifying neural signatures of being aware versus unaware of simple stimuli. This is often investigated in the context of near-threshold detection, with reports of stimulus awareness being linked to heightened activation in a frontoparietal network. However, because of reports of stimulus presence typically...

There is increasing evidence that imagination relies on similar neural mechanisms as externally triggered perception. This overlap presents a challenge for perceptual reality monitoring: deciding what is real and what is imagined. Here, we explore how perceptual reality monitoring might be implemented in the brain. We first describe sensory and cog...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1093/nc/niab005.][This corrects the article DOI: 10.1093/nc/niab025.].

People with Alzheimer's disease (AD) demonstrate a range of alterations in consciousness. Changes in awareness of cognitive deficit, self‐awareness, and introspection are seen early in AD, and dysfunction of awareness and arousal progresses with increasing disease severity. However, heterogeneity of deficits between individuals and a lack of empiri...

Updating one’s beliefs about the causes and effects of climate change is crucial for altering attitudes and behaviours. Importantly, metacognitive abilities - insight into the (in)correctness of one’s beliefs- play a key role in the formation of polarized beliefs. We investigated the role of domain-general and domain-specific metacognition in updat...

Representing the absence of objects is psychologically demanding. People are slower, less confident and show lower metacognitive sensitivity (the alignment between subjective confidence and objective accuracy) when reporting the absence compared with presence of visual stimuli. However, what counts as a stimulus absence remains only loosely defined...

High self-esteem, an overall positive evaluation of self-worth, is a cornerstone of mental health. Previously we showed that people with low self-esteem differentially construct beliefs about momentary self-worth derived from social feedback. However, it remains unknown whether these anomalies extend to constructing beliefs about self-performance i...

Metacognition is the ability to reflect on, and evaluate, our cognition and behaviour. Distortions in metacognition are common in mental health disorders, though the neural underpinnings of such dysfunction are unknown. One reason for this is that models of key components of metacognition, such as decision confidence, are generally specified at an...

Do people have privileged and direct access to their own minds, or do we infer our own thoughts and feelings indirectly, as we would infer the mental states of others? In this study we shed light on this question by examining how mentalizing ability—the set of processes involved in understanding other people’s thoughts and feelings—relates to metac...

Functional cognitive disorder (FCD) is common but underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. Metacognition, an individual's ability to reflect on and monitor cognitive processes, is likely to be relevant. Local metacognition refers to an ability to estimate confidence in cognitive performance on a moment-to-moment basis, whereas global metacog...

Metacognition is the ability to reflect on our own cognition and mental states. It is a critical aspect of human subjective experience and operates across many hierarchical levels of abstraction—encompassing “local” confidence in isolated decisions and “global” self-beliefs about our abilities and skills. Alterations in metacognition are considered...

Despite the tangible progress in psychological and cognitive sciences over the last several years, the discipline still trails other more mature sciences in identifying the most important questions that need to be solved. Reaching such consensus could lead to greater synergy across disciplines, faster progress, and increased focus on solving import...

Some aspects of human metacognition, such as the ability to consciously evaluate our beliefs and decisions, are thought to be culturally acquired. However, direct evidence for this claim is lacking. As an initial step in answering this question, here we examine differences in metacognitive performance between populations matched for occupation (stu...

Computing confidence in one's own and others' decisions is crucial for success in many social situations. There has been substantial progress in our understanding of confidence in oneself, but little is known about how we form confidence in others. Here, we address this question by asking subjects undergoing fMRI to place bets on perceptual decisio...

The metacognitive sense of confidence can play a critical role in regulating decision-making. In particular, a lack of confidence can justify the explicit, potentially costly, instrumental acquisition of extra information that might resolve the underlying uncertainty. Recent work has suggested a statistically sophisticated tapestry behind the infor...

Biases in the consideration of evidence can reduce the chances of consensus between people with different viewpoints. While such altered information processing typically leads to detrimental performance in laboratory tasks, the ubiquitous nature of confirmation bias makes it unlikely that selective information processing is universally harmful. Her...

People have better metacognitive sensitivity for decisions about the presence compared to the absence of objects. However, it is not only objects themselves that can be present or absent, but also parts of objects and other visual features. Asymmetries in visual search indicate that a disadvantage for representing absence may operate at these level...

Significance Dogmatic individuals are reluctant to seek out new information to refine their views, often skewing political, scientific, and religious discourse in the process. The cognitive drivers of this reluctance are poorly understood. Here, we isolate an influence of uncertainty on information search using a low-level perceptual decision-makin...

Metacognition is the ability to reflect on, and evaluate, our cognition and behaviour. Distortions in metacognition are common in mental health disorders, though the neural underpinnings of such dysfunction are unknown. One reason for this is that models of key components of metacognition, such as decision confidence, are generally specified at an...

An increasing proportion of cognitive difficulties are recognized to have a functional cause, the chief clinical indicator of which is internal inconsistency. When these symptoms are impairing or distressing, and not better explained by other disorders, this can be conceptualized as a cognitive variant of functional neurological disorder, termed fu...

Selective consideration of information is a prominent feature of human behaviour, and recent studies have identified proneness to confirmation bias as a cognitive feature underlying dogmatic beliefs. While such altered information processing typically leads to detrimental performance in laboratory tasks, the ubiquitous nature of confirmation bias m...

A core feature of human cognition is an ability to separate private states of mind – what we think or believe – from public actions – what we say or do. This ability is central to successful social interaction – with different social contexts often requiring different mappings between private states and public actions in order to minimise conflict...

A core feature of human cognition is an ability to separate private states of mind – what we think or believe – from public actions – what we say or do. This ability is central to successful social interaction – with different social contexts often requiring different mappings between private states and public actions in order to minimise conflict...

A core feature of human cognition is an ability to separate private states of mind – what we think or believe – from public actions – what we say or do. This ability is central to successful social interaction – with different social contexts often requiring different mappings between private states and public actions in order to minimise conflict...

A prominent source of polarised and entrenched beliefs is confirmation bias, where evidence against one’s position is selectively disregarded. This effect is most starkly evident when opposing parties are highly confident in their decisions. Here we combine human magnetoencephalography (MEG) with behavioural and neural modelling to identify alterat...

Is metacognition a general resource shared across domains? Previous research has documented consistent biases in judgments across tasks. In contrast, there is debate regarding the domain generality or the domain specificity of the ability to discriminate between correct and incorrect answers (metacognitive sensitivity) because most previous work ha...

Metacognition – the ability to represent, monitor and control ongoing cognitive processes – helps us perform many tasks, both when acting alone and when working with others. While metacognition is adaptive, and found in other animals, we should not assume that all human forms of metacognition are gene-based adaptations. Instead, some forms may have...

A core feature of human cognition is an ability to separate private states of mind - what we think or believe - from public actions - what we say or do. This ability is central to navigating social interactions in which different contexts require different mappings between private states and public actions in order to minimise conflict and facilita...

Background: Metacognition, or the ability to reflect on one’s own thoughts, may be important in the development of depressive symptoms. Recent work has reported that depressive symptoms were associated with lower metacognitive bias (overall confidence) during perceptual decision making and a trend toward a positive association with metacognitive se...

Individuals frequently choose between accomplishing goals using unaided cognitive abilities or offloading cognitive demands onto external tools and resources. For example, in order to remember an upcoming appointment one might rely on unaided memory or create a reminder by setting a smartphone alert. Setting a reminder incurs both a cost (the time/...

Introduction: Functional Cognitive Disorder (FCD) is common. Despite this, there is no evidence-based consensus on how to treat FCD. Poor metacognitive ability has been suggested as a key mechanism underlying the disorder. This paper evaluates the proposal that strategies which improve metacognition could provide a mechanistically plausible transla...

Polarization is one of the biggest societal challenges of our time, yet its drivers are poorly understood. Here we propose a novel approach - computational political psychology - which uses behavioral tasks in combination with formal computational models to identify candidate cognitive processes underpinning susceptibility to polarized beliefs abou...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1093/nc/niz009.][This corrects the article DOI: 10.1093/nc/niz009.].

It is becoming widely appreciated that higher stimulus sensitivity trivially increases estimates of metacognitive sensitivity. Therefore, meaningful comparisons of metacognitive ability across conditions and observers necessitates equating stimulus sensitivity. To achieve this, one common approach is to use a continuous staircase that runs througho...

Previous work has established that social cues such as the direction of others’ gaze or their perspective on a scene may influence one’s own perceptual judgments. However, up until now it has remained unclear whether such influences are exerted at a perceptual or decisional locus, as most previous studies have used response times as their primary d...

Metacognition, the ability to internally evaluate our own cognitive performance, is particularly useful since many real-life decisions lack immediate feedback. While most previous studies have focused on the construction of confidence at the level of single decisions, little is known about the formation of "global" self-performance estimates (SPEs)...

It is becoming widely appreciated that higher stimulus sensitivity trivially increases estimates of metacognitive sensitivity. Therefore, meaningful comparisons of metacognitive ability across conditions and observers necessitates equating stimulus sensitivity. To achieve this, one common approach is to use a continuous staircase that runs througho...

Established models of perceptual metacognition, the ability to evaluate our perceptual judgements, posit that perceptual confidence depends on the strength or quality of feedforward sensory evidence. However, alternative theoretical accounts suggest the entire perception-action cycle, and not only variation in sensory evidence, is monitored when ev...

Scientific research on consciousness is critical to multiple scientific, clinical, and ethical issues. The growth of the field could also be beneficial to several areas including neurology and mental health research. To achieve this goal, we need to set funding priorities carefully and address problems such as job creation and potential media misre...

The metacognitive ability to introspect about self-performance varies substantially across individuals. Given that effective monitoring of performance is deemed important for effective behavioral control, intervening to improve metacognition may have widespread benefits, for example in educational and clinical settings. However, it is unknown wheth...

Is metacognition a general resource shared across domains? Previous research has documented consistent biases in confidence judgments across tasks. However, the ability to discriminate between correct and incorrect answers (metacognitive sensitivity) is often held to be domain-specific, based on non-significant correlations across domains. Such nul...

Widening polarization about political, religious, and scientific issues threatens open societies, leading to entrenchment of beliefs, reduced mutual understanding, and a pervasive negativity surrounding the very idea of consensus [1, 2]. Such radicalization has been linked to systematic differences in the certainty with which people adhere to parti...

Metacognition supports reflection upon and control of other cognitive processes. Despite metacognition occupying a central role in human psychology, its neural substrates remain underdetermined, partly due to study-specific differences in task domain and type of metacognitive judgement under study. It is also unclear how metacognition relates to ot...

VaccaroFleming_SupplementaryMaterials – Supplemental material for Thinking about thinking: A coordinate-based meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies of metacognitive judgements

The scientific study of consciousness emerged as an organized field of research only a few decades ago. As empirical results have begun to enhance our understanding of consciousness, it is important to find out whether other factors, such as funding for consciousness research and status of consciousness scientists, provide a suitable environment fo...

Individuals frequently choose between accomplishing goals using unaided cognitive abilities or offloading cognitive demands onto external tools and resources. For example, in order to remember an upcoming appointment one might rely on unaided memory or create a reminder by setting a smartphone alert. Setting a reminder incurs both a cost (the time/...

The scientific study of consciousness became an organized field of research less than thirty years ago. Since then, a large number of empirical findings increased our understanding of consciousness. Scientific progress, however, does not only consist on the advancement of knowledge. Increased funding for consciousness research and the rising status...

Previous work has established that social cues such as the direction of others’ gaze or perspective on a scene may influence one’s own perceptual judgments. However up until now it has remained unclear whether such influences are exerted at a perceptual or decisional locus, as most previous studies have used response times as their primary dependen...