Steve Fleming
Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London
I am Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the Department of Experimental Psychology and Group Leader at the Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry. The group’s research focuses on the mechanisms supporting human subjective experience and metacognition by employing a combination of psychophysics, brain imaging and computational modelling. I am a 2018 Philip Leverhulme Prize Winner. People are perhaps unaware of how much computational work there is now in the field of cognitive neuroscience. So we're used to seeing images of the brain that are produced by brain imaging technologies. But now the field is not just interested in knowing where things happen in the brain, but understanding how those brain processes can tell us something about the underlying computational and psychological processes that really support how we think, how we feel, how we make decisions.
EXPs by Steve Fleming
Metacognition literally means cognition about cognition or thinking about our own thinking. In our research, it is a broader topic than that; it refers to reflection on our own mental states, our own perceptions, our memories and our decisions.
Consciousness is usually defined as the subjective feeling of what it is like to have an experience. That is somewhat circular, but we can define consciousness with reference to its absence.
There is evidence that artificial systems can form sophisticated representations of other minds. Whether they are also then doing that to themselves and to their own processes is still very much an open question.