Objective Measures, Subjective Experience, and Metacognition

Creative Language Technologies

This is episode #30 of the podcast and it’s Thursday, the 23rd of March, 2023.

A couple of month ago, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Stephen Fleming, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience and Royal Society at the Department of Experimental Psychology, University College London, where he leads the Metacognition Group. He is also a Group Leader at the Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Principal Investigator at the Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging. The group’s research focuses on understanding the relationship between objective measures (behaviour and brain activity) and subjective experience and metacognition. Steve’s research on metacognition has been recognised by several early career awards including the British Academy Wiley Prize in Psychology (2016), a Philip Leverhulme Prize in Psychology (2018), and the British Psychological Society Spearman Medal (2019). He was a previous Executive Director of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (2014-2020), and is an editor at the journals PNAS Nexus and Mind and Language. He writes widely for a general audience, including articles for Aeon, New Scientist and Scientific American, and is the author of Know Thyself, a trade book on the science of metacognition.

In the interview, we touched on various aspects of metacognition as well as on its connection to artificial intelligence (details are provided in the notes from the interview).

Here is the show.
Show Notes:
- Metacognition (definition and objective measures)
- Metacognition vs. intelligence
- Strategies to improve our metacognitive awareness and abilities: self-assessment vs. external feedback
- Explainable AI (can metacognition help us design AI that can explain how it reached its decision?)
- Current large language models (GPT-3, chatGPT) and some of their problems
- Social media: how would knowledge of meta-cognition can help us design spaces that support social connections (and how to reduce misinformation online)
- The promise of artificial therapy
- The objective and the subjective (How should / can objective science make room for the subjective in its own right?)
Steve’s books and lab:

Know Thyself https://www.amazon.com/Know-Thyself-Self-Awareness-Stephen-Fleming/dp/1541672844
The MetaLab http://metacoglab.org/