Abstract
Choice confidence, an individual's internal estimate of judgment accuracy, plays a critical role in adaptive behaviour, yet its neural representations during decision formation remain underexplored. Here, we recorded simultaneous EEG-fMRI while participants performed a direction discrimination task and rated their confidence on each trial. Using multivariate single-trial discriminant analysis of the EEG, we identified a stimulus-independent component encoding confidence, which appeared prior to subjects' explicit choice and confidence report, and was consistent with a confidence measure predicted by an accumulation-to-bound model of decision-making. Importantly, trial-to-trial variability in this electrophysiologically-derived confidence signal was uniquely associated with fMRI responses in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC), a region not typically associated with confidence for perceptual decisions. Furthermore, activity in the VMPFC was functionally coupled with regions of the frontal cortex linked to perceptual decision-making and metacognition. Our results suggest that the VMPFC holds an early confidence representation arising from decision dynamics, preceding and potentially informing metacognitive evaluation.
Highlights
Our everyday lives involve situations where we must make judgments based on noisy or incomplete sensory information – for example deciding whether crossing the street on a foggy morning, in poor visibility, is safe
Being able to rely on an internal estimate of whether our perceptual judgments are accurate is fundamental to adaptive behaviour and recent years have seen a growing interest in understanding the neural basis of confidence judgments
We found that clusters in the bilateral orbitofrontal cortex (OFC; peak MNI: [16 18 -16] and [À28 28–20]), left anterior prefrontal cortex, and right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (Figure 6) showed increased negative correlation with ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) activation during the perceptual decision
Summary
Our everyday lives involve situations where we must make judgments based on noisy or incomplete sensory information – for example deciding whether crossing the street on a foggy morning, in poor visibility, is safe. Psychophysiological work in humans and non-human primates using time-resolved measurements has shown that confidence encoding can be observed at earlier stages, and as early as the decision process itself (Kiani and Shadlen, 2009; Zizlsperger et al, 2014; Gherman and Philiastides, 2015) In line with these latter observations, recent fMRI studies have reported confidence-related signals nearer the time of decision (e.g., during perceptual stimulation) in regions such as the striatum (Hebart et al, 2016), dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (Heereman et al, 2015), cingulate and insular cortices (Paul et al, 2015), and other areas of the prefrontal, parietal, and occipital cortices (Heereman et al, 2015; Paul et al, 2015). Confidence-related processing has been reported in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) during value-based decisions and various ratings tasks (De Martino et al, 2013; Lebreton et al, 2015), the extent to which this
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
