Abstract
Metacognitive abilities allow us to adjust ongoing behavior and modify future decisions in the absence of external feedback. Although metacognition is critical in many daily life settings, it remains unclear what information is actually being monitored and what kind of information is being used for metacognitive decisions. In the present study, we investigated whether response information connected to perceptual events contribute to metacognitive decision-making. Therefore, we recorded EEG signals during a perceptual color discrimination task while participants were asked to provide an estimate about the quality of their decision on each trial. Critically, the moment participants provided their confidence judgments varied across conditions, thereby changing the amount of action information (e.g., response competition or response fluency) available for metacognitive decisions. Results from three experiments demonstrate that metacognitive performance improved when first-order action information was available at the moment metacognitive decisions about the perceptual task had to be provided. This behavioral effect was accompanied by enhanced functional connectivity (beta phase synchrony) between motor areas and prefrontal regions, exclusively observed during metacognitive decision-making. Our findings demonstrate that action information contributes to metacognitive decision-making, thereby painting a picture of metacognition as a process that integrates sensory evidence and information about our interactions with the world.
Highlights
Metacognitive abilities allow us to adjust ongoing behavior and modify future decisions in the absence of external feedback
We recorded electroencephalographic signals to investigate whether functional connectivity between motor regions and prefrontal cortex could serve as a mechanism to convey relevant action information during metacognitive decision-making
Because of the known influence of first-order task performance on metacognitive performance, metacognitive efficiency is a measure of metacognitive performance that is more independent from variability in first-order performance[30]
Summary
Metacognitive abilities allow us to adjust ongoing behavior and modify future decisions in the absence of external feedback. Results from three experiments demonstrate that metacognitive performance improved when firstorder action information was available at the moment metacognitive decisions about the perceptual task had to be provided This behavioral effect was accompanied by enhanced functional connectivity (beta phase synchrony) between motor areas and prefrontal regions, exclusively observed during metacognitive decision-making. Pasquali and colleagues explored neural network architectures aimed at capturing the complex relationships between first-order and second-order (metacognitive) performance in a range of different cognitive tasks and suggested that metacognitive judgments are rooted in learned redescriptions of first-order error information rather than in the relevant first-order information itself[18] This is broadly consistent with Fleming and Daw’s perspective, in which they offered to unify the above observations in a single framework in which confidence operates as a second-order computation about one’s own performance[19]. We expected both functional connectivity (beta phase synchrony) and metacognitive performance to increase when response information about first-order decisions would be accessible during metacognitive decision-making
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