Abstract
Humans create metacognitive beliefs about their performance across many levels of abstraction-from local confidence in individual decisions to global estimates of our skills and abilities. Despite a rich literature on the neural basis of local confidence judgements, how global self-performance estimates (SPEs) are constructed remains unknown. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we scanned human subjects while they performed several short blocks of tasks and reported on which task they think they performed best, providing a behavioral proxy for global SPEs. In a frontoparietal network sensitive to fluctuations in local confidence, we found that activity within ventromedial prefrontal cortex and precuneus was additionally modulated by global SPEs. In contrast, activity in ventral striatum was associated with subjects' global SPEs irrespective of fluctuations in local confidence, and predicted the extent to which global SPEs tracked objective task difficulty across individuals. Our findings reveal neural representations of global SPEs that go beyond the tracking of local confidence, and lay the groundwork for understanding how a formation of global self-beliefs may go awry in conditions characterized by distorted self-evaluation.
Highlights
Humans create metacognitive beliefs about their performance across many levels of abstraction—from local confidence in individual decisions to global estimates of our skills and abilities
Local confidence in mnemonic [24] and perceptual [25] judgments has been associated with activity profiles of the precuneus (PRECU) situated in medial parietal cortex. These findings provide converging evidence that midline frontoparietal regions ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), PRECU, and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) serve as key hubs for confidence formation in the human brain, which, together with anterior prefrontal regions implicated in self-reflection [26, 27], may support a large range of metacognitive abilities
Consistent with previous studies, we identified a number of areas in which activity was modulated by local confidence (Fig. 2 and SI Appendix, Fig. S4 and Table S1), including negative correlations within a network that encompassed dACC, presupplementary motor area, inferior frontal gyrus, and bilateral insula, and positive correlations in vmPFC, PRECU, fusiform gyrus, bilateral inferior frontal cortex, angular gyrus, and inferior/midtemporal gyrus (SI Appendix, Fig. S4 and Table S1)
Summary
Humans create metacognitive beliefs about their performance across many levels of abstraction—from local confidence in individual decisions to global estimates of our skills and abilities. In forming a global SPE about our job performance, we might integrate multiple local confidence estimates about various independent decisions and tasks that we have carried out These global SPEs (which may be related selfefficacy estimates) are thought to determine the goals we choose to pursue and regulate the motivation and effort put into pursuing them [6, 7]. Local confidence in mnemonic [24] and perceptual [25] judgments has been associated with activity profiles of the precuneus (PRECU) situated in medial parietal cortex Taken together, these findings provide converging evidence that midline frontoparietal regions vmPFC, PRECU, and dACC serve as key hubs for confidence formation in the human brain, which, together with anterior prefrontal regions implicated in self-reflection [26, 27], may support a large range of metacognitive abilities. Our findings of a neurocognitive basis for global SPEs lay the groundwork for understanding how distorted SPEs arise in educational and clinical settings
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