scholarly journals Electrophysiological correlates of confidence differ across correct and erroneous perceptual decisions

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel C Feuerriegel ◽  
Mackenzie Murphy ◽  
Alexandra Konski ◽  
Jie Sun ◽  
Vinay Mepani ◽  
...  

Every decision we make is accompanied by an estimate of the likelihood that our decision is accurate or appropriate. This likelihood estimate is termed our degree of decision confidence. Recent work has uncovered event-related potential (ERP) correlates of confidence both during decision formation and after a decision has been made. However, the interpretation of these findings is complicated by methodological issues related to ERP amplitude measurement that are prevalent across existing studies. To more accurately characterise the neural correlates of confidence, we presented participants with a difficult perceptual decision task that elicited a broad range of confidence ratings. We identified a frontal ERP component within an onset prior to the behavioural response, which exhibited more positive-going amplitudes in trials with higher confidence ratings. This frontal effect also biased measures of the centro-parietal positivity (CPP) component at parietal electrodes via volume conduction. Amplitudes of the error positivity (Pe) component that followed each decision were negatively associated with confidence for trials with decision errors, but not for trials with correct decisions. We provide evidence for both pre- and post- decisional neural correlates of decision confidence that are observed in trials with correct and erroneous decisions, respectively. Our findings suggest that certainty in having made a correct response is associated with frontal activity during decision formation, whereas certainty in having committed an error is instead associated with the post-decisional Pe component. We additionally show that some previously reported associations between decision confidence and CPP/Pe component amplitudes are (at least partly) a consequence of ERP amplitude measurement-related confounds.

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tanja Krumpe ◽  
Peter Gerjets ◽  
Wolfgang Rosenstiel ◽  
Martin Spüler

AbstractDecision making is an essential part of daily life, in which balancing reasons and calculating risks to reach a certain confidence are important to make reasonable choices. To investigate the EEG correlates of confidence during decision making a study involving a forced choice recognition memory task was implemented. Subjects were asked to distinguish old from new pictures and rate their decision with either high or low confidence. Event-related potential (ERP) analysis was performed in four different phases covering all stages of decision making, including the information encoding, retrieval, decision formation, and feedback processing during the recognition task. Additionally, a single trial support-vector machine (SVM) classification was performed on the ERPs of each phase to get a measure of differentiability of the two levels of confidence on a single subject level. It could be shown that the level of decision confidence is significantly reflected in all stages of decision making but most prominently during feedback presentation. The main differences between high and low confidence can be found in the ERPs during feedback presentation after a correct answer, whereas almost no differences can be found in ERPs from feedback to wrong answers. In the feedback phase the two levels of confidence can be separated with a classification accuracy of up to 70 % on average over all subjects, therefore showing potential as a control state in a brain-computer Interface (BCI) application.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Voodla ◽  
Andero Uusberg

It remains unclear to what extent the performance-monitoring (PM) processes involved in perceptual decisions are also involved in more complex reasoning decisions. To address this problem, we examined the role of PM-related cortical potentials in decision confidence. In simple perceptual decisions, the amplitude of these potentials has been shown to correlate with errors on the one hand and confidence ratings on the other. We therefore asked whether PM-related potentials mediate the effects of experimental manipulations of decision confidence on confidence ratings in an arithmetic reasoning task. In an EEG experiment, 49 participants had to quickly decide whether an equation (e.g. 9 * 7 = 65) was correct or incorrect and then report their confidence in that decision. Task difficulty and response fluency were varied to manipulate confidence. Pooling responses across correct as well as incorrect trials, we analyzed amplitudes of Error-Related Negativity (pooled ERN) and Error Positivity (pooled Pe). The results indicated that although pooled ERN and pooled Pe correlated with task difficulty, neither potential mediated the effect of task difficulty on confidence. Response fluency had an effect on confidence only for simple problems and this effect was partially mediated by pooled ERN but not by pooled Pe. These results suggest that pooled ERN and pooled Pe may reflect implicit performance monitoring, whereas pooled ERN may mediate the effect of the fluency heuristic on decision confidence. decision confidence, mental arithmetic, ERN, Pe, fluency, task difficulty, ACC, performance-monitoring


Author(s):  
Xu Xu ◽  
Chunyan Kang ◽  
Kaia Sword ◽  
Taomei Guo

Abstract. The ability to identify and communicate emotions is essential to psychological well-being. Yet research focusing exclusively on emotion concepts has been limited. This study examined nouns that represent emotions (e.g., pleasure, guilt) in comparison to nouns that represent abstract (e.g., wisdom, failure) and concrete entities (e.g., flower, coffin). Twenty-five healthy participants completed a lexical decision task. Event-related potential (ERP) data showed that emotion nouns elicited less pronounced N400 than both abstract and concrete nouns. Further, N400 amplitude differences between emotion and concrete nouns were evident in both hemispheres, whereas the differences between emotion and abstract nouns had a left-lateralized distribution. These findings suggest representational distinctions, possibly in both verbal and imagery systems, between emotion concepts versus other concepts, implications of which for theories of affect representations and for research on affect disorders merit further investigation.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Xiaoyu Tang ◽  
Xueli Wang ◽  
Xing Peng ◽  
Qi Li ◽  
Chi Zhang ◽  
...  

AbstractInhibition of return (IOR) refers to the slower response to targets appearing on the same side as the cue (valid locations) than to targets appearing on the opposite side as the cue (invalid locations). Previous behaviour studies have found that the visual IOR is larger than the audiovisual IOR when focusing on both visual and auditory modalities. Utilising the high temporal resolution of the event-related potential (ERP) technique we explored the possible neural correlates with the behaviour IOR difference between visual and audiovisual targets. The behavioural results revealed that the visual IOR was larger than the audiovisual IOR. The ERP results showed that the visual IOR effect was generated from the P1 and N2 components, while the audiovisual IOR effect was derived only from the P3 component. Multisensory integration (MSI) of audiovisual targets occurred on the P1, N1 and P3 components, which may offset the reduced perceptual processing due to audiovisual IOR. The results of early and late differences in the neural processing of the visual IOR and audiovisual IOR imply that the two target types may have different inhibitory orientation mechanisms.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mirko Lehmann ◽  
Claudia Neumann ◽  
Sven Wasserthal ◽  
Johannes Schultz ◽  
Achilles Delis ◽  
...  

Abstract Only little research has been conducted on the pharmacological underpinnings of metacognition. Here, we tested the modulatory effects of a single intravenous dose (100 ng/ml) of the N-methyl-D-aspartate-glutamate-receptor antagonist ketamine, a compound known to induce altered states of consciousness, on metacognition and its neural correlates. Fifty-three young, healthy adults completed two study phases of an episodic memory task involving both encoding and retrieval in a double-blind, placebo-controlled fMRI study. Trial-by-trial confidence ratings were collected during retrieval. Effects on the subjective state of consciousness were assessed using the 5D-ASC questionnaire. Confirming that the drug elicited a psychedelic state, there were effects of ketamine on all 5D-ASC scales. Acute ketamine administration during retrieval had deleterious effects on metacognitive sensitivity (meta-d′) and led to larger metacognitive bias, with retrieval performance (d′) and reaction times remaining unaffected. However, there was no ketamine effect on metacognitive efficiency (meta-d′/d′). Measures of the BOLD signal revealed that ketamine compared to placebo elicited higher activation of posterior cortical brain areas, including superior and inferior parietal lobe, calcarine gyrus, and lingual gyrus, albeit not specific to metacognitive confidence ratings. Ketamine administered during encoding did not significantly affect performance or brain activation. Overall, our findings suggest that ketamine impacts metacognition, leading to significantly larger metacognitive bias and deterioration of metacognitive sensitivity as well as unspecific activation increases in posterior hot zone areas of the neural correlates of consciousness.


2007 ◽  
Vol 19 (8) ◽  
pp. 1259-1274 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dietmar Roehm ◽  
Ina Bornkessel-Schlesewsky ◽  
Frank Rösler ◽  
Matthias Schlesewsky

We report a series of event-related potential experiments designed to dissociate the functionally distinct processes involved in the comprehension of highly restricted lexical-semantic relations (antonyms). We sought to differentiate between influences of semantic relatedness (which are independent of the experimental setting) and processes related to predictability (which differ as a function of the experimental environment). To this end, we conducted three ERP studies contrasting the processing of antonym relations (black-white) with that of related (black-yellow) and unrelated (black-nice) word pairs. Whereas the lexical-semantic manipulation was kept constant across experiments, the experimental environment and the task demands varied: Experiment 1 presented the word pairs in a sentence context of the form The opposite of X is Y and used a sensicality judgment. Experiment 2 used a word pair presentation mode and a lexical decision task. Experiment 3 also examined word pairs, but with an antonymy judgment task. All three experiments revealed a graded N400 response (unrelated > related > antonyms), thus supporting the assumption that semantic associations are processed automatically. In addition, the experiments revealed that, in highly constrained task environments, the N400 gradation occurs simultaneously with a P300 effect for the antonym condition, thus leading to the superficial impression of an extremely “reduced” N400 for antonym pairs. Comparisons across experiments and participant groups revealed that the P300 effect is not only a function of stimulus constraints (i.e., sentence context) and experimental task, but that it is also crucially influenced by individual processing strategies used to achieve successful task performance.


Neuroreport ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 268-273
Author(s):  
Lina F. Guerrero ◽  
Badiâa Bouazzaoui ◽  
Michel Isingrini ◽  
Emilie Alibran ◽  
Lucie Angel

2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (9) ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Yue Jiang

I investigated neural processing during the recognition of pride and joy in early childhood using the event-related potential (ERP) technique. Electroencephalography recording was taken of 21 children aged between 4 and 6 years. They were shown photographs of familiar peers and strangers whose facial expressions displayed the emotion of either pride or joy. ERPs were recorded for the children's judgment of the expression of these two emotions when an image was presented. The results demonstrate that the neural dynamics during children's recognition of pride and joy involve three stages: The early negative component is spontaneously responsive to familiar faces, the midlatency negative central component is responsive to expression of familiar faces, and the late positive component marks greater extended processing of an expression of pride. These findings provide new insight into the neural mechanism of pride and joy recognition in children aged 4 to 6 years.


2004 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 415-426 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark A. Sabbagh ◽  
Margaret C. Moulson ◽  
Kate L. Harkness

Successful negotiation of human social interactions rests on having a theory of mind—an understanding of how others' behaviors can be understood in terms of internal mental states, such as beliefs, desires, intentions, and emotions. A core theory-of-mind skill is the ability to decode others' mental states on the basis of observable information, such as facial expressions. Although several recent studies have focused on the neural correlates of reasoning about mental states, no research has addressed the question of what neural systems underlie mental state decoding. We used dense-array eventrelated potentials (ERP) to show that decoding mental states from pictures of eyes is associated with an N270–400 component over inferior frontal and anterior temporal regions of the right hemisphere. Source estimation procedures suggest that orbitofrontal and medial temporal regions may underlie this ERP effect. These findings suggest that different components of everyday theory-of-mind skills may rely on dissociable neural mechanisms.


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