A shared brain system forming confidence judgment across cognitive domains

Confidence is typically defined as a subjective judgment about whether a decision is right. Decisions are based on sources of information that come from various cognitive domains and are processed in different brain systems. An unsettled question is whether the brain computes confidence in a similar manner whatever the domain or in a manner that would be idiosyncratic to each domain. To address this issue, human participants of both sexes performed a new paradigm probing confidence in decisions made about the same material (history and geography statements), but based on different cognitive processes: semantic memory for deciding whether the statement was true or false, and duration perception for deciding whether the statement display was long or short. At the behavioral level, we found that the same factors (difficulty, accuracy, response time and confidence in the preceding decision) predicted confidence judgments in both tasks. At the neural level, we observed using fMRI that confidence judgments in both tasks were associated to activity in the same brain regions: positively in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and negatively in a prefronto-parietal network. Together, these findings suggest the existence of a shared brain system that generates confidence judgments in a similar manner across cognitive domains.

Assumptions and confidence of others: the impact of socio-cognitive information on metacognitive self-regulation

Self-regulated learning rarely happens in isolation and although there is a wide range of evidence that socio-cognitive information may impact decision making and learning, its role in metacognitive self-regulation remains understudied. Thus, we investigated how socio-cognitive information on assumptions and confidence in assumptions of an unknown other in a learning setting affects (1) changes in assumptions (i.e., convergence towards other), (2) perception of the other’s competence, and (3) the search for information (i.e., metacognitive and conflict-based regulation). In our empirical study, N = 60 students first read texts, then judged statements as being true or false and stated their confidence in these assumptions on an integrated confidence/answer scale, were then confronted with bogus information on the supposed answers of another learner (computer generated), and were then asked to (1) re-state their assumptions including confidence judgment, (2) judge the other’s competence, and (3) decide what statements they wanted additional information on. Results showed that learners (1) converged towards the other learner, (2) judged the other’s competence in accordance with the other’s stated confidence, and (3) regulated their learning based on their own (adjusted) confidence rather than on the presence or absence of socio-cognitive conflicts. This suggests that socio-cognitive information can affect how learners metacognitively evaluate own assumptions and thus impact self-regulatory processes, but also that confidence of others affects their perceived competence. Although the direct impact of socio-cognitive conflicts on regulatory processes remains unclear, this study fosters our understanding of self-regulated learning processes within social contexts.

Global visual confidence

Visual confidence is the observers’ estimate of their precision in one single perceptual decision. Ultimately, however, observers often need to judge their confidence over a task in general rather than merely on one single decision. Here, we measured the global confidence acquired across multiple perceptual decisions. Participants performed a dual task on two series of oriented stimuli. The perceptual task was an orientation-discrimination judgment. The metacognitive task was a global confidence judgment: observers chose the series for which they felt they had performed better in the perceptual task. We found that choice accuracy in global confidence judgments improved as the number of items in the series increased, regardless of whether the global confidence judgment was made before (prospective) or after (retrospective) the perceptual decisions. This result is evidence that global confidence judgment was based on an integration of confidence information across multiple perceptual decisions rather than on a single one. Furthermore, we found a tendency for global confidence choices to be influenced by response times, and more so for recent perceptual decisions than earlier ones in the series of stimuli. Using model comparison, we found that global confidence is well described as a combination of noisy estimates of sensory evidence and position-weighted response-time evidence. In summary, humans can integrate information across multiple decisions to estimate global confidence, but this integration is not optimal, in particular because of biases in the use of response-time information.

Monitoring the Own Spatial Thinking in Second Grade of Primary Education in a Spanish School: Preliminary Study Analyzing Gender Differences

Previous studies on metacognitive performance have explored children’s abilities during primary school (7–11 years) in abstract and mathematical reasoning tasks. However, there have been no studies evaluating the metamemory processes with spatial tasks in primary school children, and even more generally, only a few studies have explored spatial metacognition in adults. Taking as a preliminary study a Spanish school, the present work explores the validity of the confidence judgment model when thinking about one’s own performance in a spatial test, for boys and girls in Second Year of Primary Education (mean age of 7 years). A total of 18 boys and 15 girls applied a 4-point scale to evaluate, item by item, the confidence of their responses in the Spatial aptitude test “E” of the EFAI-1 (Factorial Assessment of Intellectual Abilities to mentally process visual stimuli). Accessibility and Accuracy Indexes were calculated for each item of the spatial task. The effect of gender was analyzed too. The tasks were administered in small groups; at the end examiners interviewed each participant, performing the confidence judgment task, item by item, of the EFAI-1 previously answered. The results (analyses carried out by SPSS) showed a high mean confidence (3 mean points out of a maximum of 4), without finding any significant differences either in the spatial performance or in the mean confidence rating between boys and girls. A significant relationship between confidence judgments and spatial task performance accuracy was found. The relationship between confidence judgments and spatial performance cannot be confirmed. The procedure adapted for testing spatial judgments about the own responses has been useful for showing the well calibrated perception about performance at this stage. The implications of the results of this exploratory study and the potential of the application of the procedure to promote thought about one’s own spatial performance and the development of strategies that modulate the effective approach of this type of spatial tasks are discussed within an educational approach.

Global visual confidence

Visual confidence is the observers’ estimate of their precision in one single perceptual decision. Ultimately, however, observers often need to judge their confidence over a task in general rather than merely on one single decision. Here, we measured the global confidence acquired across multiple perceptual decisions. Participants performed a dual task on two series of oriented stimuli. The perceptual task was an orientation-discrimination judgment. The metacognitive task was a global confidence judgment: observers chose the series for which they felt they had performed better in the perceptual task. We found that choice accuracy in global confidence judgments improved as the number of items in the series increased, regardless of whether the global confidence judgment was made before (prospective) or after (retrospective) the perceptual decisions. This result is evidence that global confidence judgment was based on an integration of confidence information across multiple perceptual decisions rather than on a single one. Furthermore, we found a tendency for global confidence choices to be influenced by response times, and more so for recent perceptual decisions than earlier ones in the series of stimuli. Using model comparison, we found that global confidence is well described as a combination of noisy estimates of sensory evidence and position-weighted response-time evidence. In summary, humans can integrate information across multiple decisions to estimate global confidence, but this integration is not optimal, in particular because of biases in the use of response-time information.

Aberrant Perceptual Judgments on Speech-Relevant Acoustic Features in Hallucination-Prone Individuals

Hallucinations constitute an intriguing model of how percepts are generated and how perception can fail. Here, we investigate the hypothesis that an altered perceptual weighting of the spectro-temporal modulations that characterize speech contributes to the emergence of auditory verbal hallucinations. Healthy human adults (N = 168) varying in their predisposition to hallucinations had to choose the “more speech-like” of two presented ambiguous sound textures and give a confidence judgment. Using psychophysical reverse correlation, we quantified the contribution of different acoustic features to a listener’s perceptual decisions. Higher hallucination proneness covaried with perceptual down-weighting of speech-typical, low-frequency acoustic energy and prioritizing of high frequencies. Remarkably, higher confidence judgments in single trials depended not only on acoustic evidence but also on an individual’s hallucination proneness and schizotypy score. In line with an account of altered perceptual priors and differential weighting of sensory evidence, these results show that hallucination-prone individuals exhibit qualitative and quantitative changes in their perception of the modulations typical for speech.

NONLINEAR NEURAL NETWORK DYNAMICS ACCOUNTS FOR HUMAN CONFIDENCE IN A SEQUENCE OF PERCEPTUAL DECISIONS

ABSTRACTElectrophysiological recordings during perceptual decision tasks in monkeys suggest that the degree of confidence in a decision is based on a simple neural signal produced by the neural decision process. Attractor neural networks provide an appropriate biophysical modeling framework, and account for the experimental results very well. However, it remains unclear whether attractor neural networks can account for confidence reports in humans. We present the results from an experiment in which participants are asked to perform an orientation discrimination task, followed by a confidence judgment. Here we show that an attractor neural network model quantitatively reproduces, for each participant, the relations between accuracy, response times and confidence. We show that the attractor neural network also accounts for confidence-specific sequential effects observed in the experiment (participants are faster on trials following high confidence trials). Remarkably, this is obtained as an inevitable outcome of the network dynamics, without any feedback specific to the previous decision (that would result in, e.g., a change in the model parameters before the onset of the next trial). Our results thus suggest that a metacognitive process such as confidence in one’s decision is linked to the intrinsically nonlinear dynamics of the decision-making neural network.

A post-decisional neural marker of confidence predicts information-seeking in decision-making

Theoretical work predicts that decisions made with low confidence should lead to increased information-seeking. This is an adaptive strategy because it can increase the quality of a decision, and previous behavioral work has shown that decision-makers engage in such confidence-driven information seeking. The present study aimed to characterize the neural markers that mediate the relationship between confidence and information-seeking. A paradigm was used in which human participants made an initial perceptual decision, and then decided whether or not they wanted to sample more evidence before committing to a final decision and confidence judgment. Pre-decisional and post-decisional ERP components were similarly modulated by the level of confidence and by information-seeking choices. Time-resolved multivariate decoding of scalp EEG signals first revealed that information-seeking choices could be decoded from the time of the initial decision to the time of the subsequent information-seeking choice (within-condition decoding). No above-chance decoding was visible in the pre-response time window. Crucially, a classifier trained to decode high versus low confidence predicted information-seeking choices after the initial perceptual decision (across-condition decoding). This time window corresponds to that of a post-decisional neural marker of confidence. Collectively, our findings demonstrate for the first time that neural indices of confidence are functionally involved in information-seeking decisions.

Contextual influence on confidence judgments in human reinforcement learning

The ability to correctly estimate the probability of one’s choices being correct is fundamental to optimally re-evaluate previous choices or to arbitrate between different decision strategies. Experimental evidence nonetheless suggests that this metacognitive process -referred to as a confidence judgment-is susceptible to numerous biases. We investigate the effect of outcome valence (gains or losses) on confidence while participants learned stimulus-outcome associations by trial-and-error. In two experiments, we demonstrate that participants are more confident in their choices when learning to seek gains compared to avoiding losses. Importantly, these differences in confidence were observed despite objectively equal choice difficulty and similar observed performance between those two contexts. Using computational modelling, we show that this bias is driven by the context-value, a dynamically updated estimate of the average expected-value of choice options that has previously been demonstrated to be necessary to explain equal performance in the gain and loss domain. The biasing effect of context-value on confidence, also recently observed in the context of incentivized perceptual decision-making, is therefore domain-general, with likely important functional consequences.