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UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology

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UCL Partners CNR seminar: Dr Steve Fleming

21 April 2022, 5:30 pm–6:30 pm

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Confidence, metacognition and the construction of self-beliefs

Event Information

Open to

All

Availability

Yes

Cost

£0.00

Organiser

UCLP Centre for Neurorehabilitation

Location

Lecture Theatre
378: Institute of Neurology, 33 Queen Square
33 Queen Square
London
WC1N 3BG
United Kingdom

Lecture Theatre, 33 Queen Square, London WC1N 3BG Or Online (via Zoom)

Abstract:Beliefs about our skills and abilities (known as “self-beliefs”) may not always match reality, particularly in a variety of neurological and psychiatric conditions. This has functional consequences: if we think we won't be able to succeed in new pursuits, we may be unlikely to try in the first place. I will describe recent work combining novel tasks with brain imaging to probe the construction of self-beliefs at a number of timescales, ranging from confidence in individual trials to global estimates of self-performance. We find that confidence is a key predictor of a range of mental health symptoms in the general population, and link self-belief construction to prefrontal cortical regions involved in decision-making and metacognition.

Enquiries to: cnr@ucl.ac.uk  

About the Speaker

Dr Steve Fleming

Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and Sir Henry Dale Wellcome Trust/Royal Society Fellow at the Department of Experimental Psychology, Prinicipal Investigator at the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, and Group Leader at the Max Planck-UCL Centre f

Steve completed his PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL under the supervision of Ray Dolan and Chris Frith. He was awarded a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellowship to study with Nathaniel Daw at New York University and Matthew Rushworth at Oxford, focusing on computational models of metacognition. He returned to UCL to set up the Metacognition Group in 2015. Steve's research has been recognised with the Wiley Prize in Psychology from the British Academy (2016), a Philip Leverhulme Prize (2017) and the British Psychological Society Spearman Medal (2019).