Steve Fleming

📖 New review out today in @natrevneuro.nature.com: Towards an integrative neuroscience of metacognition 🧠🧪 Full-text link to the paper is here: rdcu.be/9YK3mF7dYhFa

1/ Our brains probably don’t store a new copy of “red” when we encounter something red. Yet we can reinstate distinct memories of red objects. How do we reuse what we already know when encoding memories? Excited to share new work led by @haoliu4391.bsky.social, with @marcelomattar.bsky.social 🧠🧵

Looking forward to the first Consciousness Club of the 2026-27 calendar! @seanfw.bsky.social will tell us about "Cortex-wide computational modelling of neural dynamics during conscious access" Wednesday 28th Oct, 11am-1230pm UK time For more info see: metacoglab.org/consciousnes... All welcome!

🚨 Today (Fri 23rd) is the last chance to download the full 109 page BBS collection on 'conscious AI and biological naturalism', including target article, 50 commentaries, and my author response. Don't miss out (& do click 'save pdf')! doi.org/10.1017/S014...

I personally host everything myself, but now as a postdoc with @smfleming.bsky.social I like our lab’s approach in which trainee repos are forked into a github organization once finalized

Fantastic new paper by @rtakatsky.bsky.social 👇

1/2 🎇 Good news! 🎇 The kind people at Behavioral and Brain Science have made the new collection on "Conscious AI and biological naturalism" #OpenAccess for a limited time: target article, all 50 commentaries, & my response. Go to the link and click 'save pdf': doi.org/10.1017/S014.... Do share!

Three reasons why AI is not conscious and perhaps never will be www.nature.com/articles/d41... - I have to say I find these arguments (by @anilseth.bsky.social, @neddo.bsky.social and G. Tononi) unconvincing... 🧵

My recent book AI and Consciousness: A Skeptical Overview is free online today and tomorrow (through Oct 19, presumably UK time). I don't think the hard copy is available yet. Get it while it's free! www.cambridge.org/core/element...

Kevin (who is on Bsky!) has done a really amazing work here. The package brings a lot of flexibility and precision to models of metacognition, and will become the new standard!

Three-year-old boy living his best possible life ☕️🍩

Why do people become addicted? When does a habit turn into self harm and what makes recovery so hard? Prof Sally Marlow + Dr Nicky Kalk @maudsleynhs.bsky.social, speak on the topic for BBC's A Question of Science hosted by @profbriancox.bsky.social Listen/watch now: www.lnk.to/AQOSAddictio...

Exciting Associate Professor opportunity in Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford, with access to state-of-the-art neuroimaging and stimulation at OHBA/OxCIN: MEG, OPM, 3T/7T MRI, TUS, TMS & more. Please share! www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DSQ831/a...

@nitalon.bsky.social , @reuth-mirsky.bsky.social , @stefansarkadi.bsky.social and I have been putting together a book! 📖 *Theory of Mind in Natural and Artificial Intelligence* coming out early next year 🧵

Episode 2 of On Wisdom's five-part special series is live! This week features a discussion on Metacognition and Judgment with hosts Igor Grossmann and Charles Cassidy. They are joined by guests Gord Pennycook, Steve Fleming, and Thomas Costello. 🎧Listen here: www.onwisdompodcast.com/70

How do minds think about themselves, and how do we study it? New review in @natrevneuro.nature.com www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Useful thread about how to navigate the (rapidly changing) threat of bots in online behavioural studies. A move to unpaid citizen science platforms might end up being the best long-term strategy here

How much of a risk are LLM-generated bots for online behavioral experiments? We present results of an entirely natural language prompt-generated agent, capable of absolving any of the 26 experiments we tested it on. Most tasks are passed with data that can pass as human osf.io/preprints/ps... (1/)

Good to see that our opinion piece on grand theories of consciousness is out. #consciousness #neuroskyence #philsci #philsky🧠 #neuroscience #brain 🧪

Best place to do neuroscience in the world.

I am able to take on new doctoral students through this amazing initiative! If you are interested please reach out to me by email to discuss.

Reposting, in case you missed it! 8-) Reskeet appreciated!

#BrainMeeting 🧠 Alert! 🎺 This Friday, October 9th, the Brain Meeting speaker will be Valentin Wyart giving a talk entitled "Zeroing in on human information seeking". Join us in person or online. Read more: www.in.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/events/ygazm...

love to see metacognition getting public attention:) www.thetransmitter.org/decision-mak...

Nobel Prize for optogenetics! www.theguardian.com/science/2026...

Excited to be launching our new PhD program in Minds and Machines at UCL with co-Directors Tali Sharot and @nadinedijkstra.bsky.social To apply, find out more here: www.ucl.ac.uk/brain-scienc... Our launch event is on Nov 10th, with a cracking lineup of speakers: luma.com/cikzcth0

New preprint! Can LLMs really know when they know? We trained 10 open models to predict their own accuracy and found a striking limit: out of distribution, confidence tracks consistency more than correctness. Led by @nicolasyax.bsky.social with @pyoudeyer.bsky.social arxiv.org/pdf/2609.33886

This is a two-fer: 1. IT cortex encodes not just what objects are, but also where they are. 2. Current AI does not work like IT cortex. www.cell.com/current-biol... #neuroscience

The Appeal of (Semi-?) Biological Naturalism [link in thread] Biological naturalism about consciousness will, I predict, soon be hot. As AI systems start to look more and more like conscious or sentient entities, at least superficially, doubters will be increasingly drawn to 1/3

Wanja is an important voice in the science of consciousness. Read his illuminating commentary on our target paper - placing it in the wider context of theories of consciousness, and pushing toward new insights.

📣 Please submit to this year's conference in Montréal!🧠 We would love to include all kinds of measures that can inform our understanding of the social brain, including physiological and neuro measures, computational models, theory pieces, and behavioral data!

Recently ran a prolific study asking ppts to describe images in <20 words. With 50 captions per person, we were able to pass each participant’s full text into Pangram. It detected 2 out of 200 with high confidence as fully AI, and about 6/7 others as borderline AI/human. FWIW :)

Two Research Assistant Positions in the Consciousness Group, BCBL, Basque Center on Cognition, Brain & Language, Donostia-San Sebastián, Spain Application deadline: 8 October 2026

I’m very grateful to @smfleming.bsky.social for his supervision and @kevingoneill.github.io for a great collaboration. We show that the PE bias in confidence judgments can be a Bayes-optimal consequence of inference in high-dimensional spaces, and in CNNs, the bias also increases with dimensionality

An important new paper from the lab : in a few years, vision models have progressed to such an extent that they almost match human perception in the domain of geometry (but may still fall short of having a genuine language of shapes).

What if consciousness isn't real? By @timbayne.bsky.social in @sciam.bsky.social "we should ask whether bees, babies or bots are conscious. But in asking that question, we should be alive to the possibility that the question itself might need replacing." www.scientificamerican.com/article/what...

5/ My response "The stuff matters: consciousness, computation, and biology" was published just now, and is here: url.uk.m.mimecastprotect.com/s/xZqFCN05NT...

1/6 An extraordinary @nature.com paper has just landed from the lab of @sergiuppasca.bsky.social. They found a way to create "xenocortical mice" which have ~92% of their cortex occupied by a cortical organoid derived from human stem cells.

Towards an integrative neuroscience of metacognition — a Review by Stephen M. Fleming #neuroscience #neuroskyence www.nature.com/articles/s41...