Stephen Fleming

Group Leader

stephen.fleming@ucl.ac.uk
Steve Fleming with short white, brown hair and glasses, wearing a suit, smiling. The background is a blue sign reading queen square.

Consciousness and Metacognition Research

We are interested in both metacognition - what people think or know about their own minds - and consciousness - our subjective experience of the world around us. We think there may be intimate links between both metacognition and consciousness, as formalized in recent computational frameworks we have developed. 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.

We are also interested in the implications of our research for clinical conditions characterized by distortions in (self-) awareness and confidence - including affective disorders, dementia and psychosis. We collaborate with clinician colleagues on these questions.

Visit the lab's website here. 

Group Members 

Lab Manager

Sarah Kalwarowsky
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s.kalwarowsky@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
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 j.castanheira@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
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kevin.o'neill@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. Kaiden Stewart
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kaiden.stewart@ucl.ac.uk                                                                         

Kaiden completed his PhD in Cognitive Psychology at the University of Waterloo, where he studied the metacognition of human reasoning. He joined the lab as a Research Fellow in 2025 to study metacognition from a social perspective. He is interested in the way we represent our own minds and the minds of others and the way these representations allow humans to optimize our behaviour and interact with others.

Kaiden is based at the Department of Experimental Psychology.

PhD Students

Martha Cottam 
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martha.cottam.23@ucl.ac.uk

Martha is a PhD student at University College London on the LIDo doctoral training programme. She joined after completing an MSc in Translational Neuroscience at Imperial College London. Her current research seeks to investigate the neural and computational mechanisms underpinning perceptual awareness using computational modelling, MEG and laminar fMRI.

Tianqi Zhan
Tianqi with straight, long dark hair, wearing a black top and smiling. The background is a blue sign and some bushy leaves.

tianqi.zhan.23@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.

Luna Huestegge
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luna.huestegge.20@ucl.ac.uk

Luna completed her MRes in Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL, where she worked with Nadine and Cristina on a project investigating how the brain tells apart imagination from reality. She has now joined the lab as a Wellcome PhD student in Mental Health Sciences, studying subjective experience and, more specifically, the cognitive and neural mechanisms that underlie hallucinations.

Joel Vasama                                                                                         
Joel with long brown hair, blue eyes and a brown beard. The background is a blue sign and bushy leaves.

 joel.vasama.24@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.

Joel is based at the Max Planck Centre.

Richard O’Farrell 
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richard.o'farrell.22@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.

Richard is based at the Department of Experimental Psychology.

Yan Wu
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yan.wu.20@ucl.ac.uk

Yan is interested in how our onetime, lived experiences are encoded and later recalled as autobiographical memories. She also asks about how these memories change after a night’s sleep, and months later after systems consolidation. She combines Virtual Reality and 7T laminar fMRI to examine how these are realised through interactions between the prefrontal cortex layers and hippocampus at the laminar and subfield levels. Yan started her PhD with Eleanor Maguire and is now continuing her PhD in the MetaLab.

Yan is based at the Department of Imaging Neuroscience, home of the Functional Imaging Laboratory (FIL).

Research Assistant 

Chang (Christina) He
Ivy Chan with straight, dark hair tied back wearing a light blue shirt and smiling. The background is a blue sign and bushy green leaves.

chang.he.24@ucl.ac.uk

Christina completed her BA in Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford before pursuing an MSc in Cognitive and Decision Sciences at UCL, where she joined the MetaLab for her master’s project. Her research used behavioural and computational methods to investigate how confidence guides the formation of simplified task representations. Christina is now continuing in the lab as a Research Assistant, extending this line of work to examine how attention and knowledge of goals shape task representations for planning in both behavioural and neuroimaging experiments. In parallel, she is exploring the functional role of consciousness in model-based planning.