Abstract
What are the cognitive mechanisms underlying perceptual metacognition? Prior research indicates that prefrontal cortex (PFC) contributes to metacognitive performance, suggesting that metacognitive judgments are supported by high-level cognitive operations. We explored this hypothesis by investigating metacognitive performance for a visual discrimination task in the context of a concurrent working memory (WM) task. We found that, overall, high WM load caused a nonspecific decrease in visual discrimination performance as well as metacognitive performance. However, active manipulation of WM contents caused a selective decrease in metacognitive performance without impairing visual discrimination performance. These behavioral findings are consistent with previous neuroscience findings that high-level PFC is engaged by and necessary for (i) visual metacognition, and (ii) active manipulation of WM contents, but not mere maintenance. The selective interference of WM manipulation on metacognition suggests that these seemingly disparate cognitive functions in fact recruit common cognitive mechanisms. The common cognitive underpinning of these tasks may consist in (i) higher-order re-representation of lower-level sensory information, and/or (ii) application of decision rules in order to transform representations in PFC into definite cognitive/motor responses.
Highlights
Perceptual metacognition refers to the capacity of human and animal observers to introspectively differentiate perceptual judgments that are likely to be correct from those that are less likely to be correct
We found that metacognitive performance was selectively impaired under high working memory (WM) load with high manipulation demand, suggesting that a common mechanism contributes to metacognitive evaluation of perceptual decision making and active manipulation of WM contents
We found that when human subjects performed a WM task concurrently with a perceptual decision making task, performance on the two tasks interacted in interesting ways
Summary
Perceptual metacognition refers to the capacity of human and animal observers to introspectively differentiate perceptual judgments that are likely to be correct from those that are less likely to be correct. DlPFC becomes more activated in WM tasks in which a cognitive strategy allows WM contents to be “chunked” into higher-level units, even though such chunking strategies effectively reduce the number of “items” in WM (Bor et al, 2003) This finding again suggests that dlPFC is more closely linked to strategic monitoring and manipulation of WM contents than it is to the overall difficulty of the memory task or to the number of items that need to be stored in WM. We might expect that metacognitive performance would be selectively impaired by concurrently manipulating WM contents, especially in light of general processing capacity limits and bottlenecks in PFC (Marois and Ivanoff, 2005). We test this hypothesis in a dual-task paradigm. We found that metacognitive performance was selectively impaired under high WM load with high manipulation demand, suggesting that a common mechanism contributes to metacognitive evaluation of perceptual decision making and active manipulation of WM contents
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