Abstract
People are capable of robust evaluations of their decisions: they are often aware of their mistakes even without explicit feedback, and report levels of confidence in their decisions that correlate with objective performance. These metacognitive abilities help people to avoid making the same mistakes twice, and to avoid overcommitting time or resources to decisions that are based on unreliable evidence. In this review, we consider progress in characterizing the neural and mechanistic basis of these related aspects of metacognition—confidence judgements and error monitoring—and identify crucial points of convergence between methods and theories in the two fields. This convergence suggests that common principles govern metacognitive judgements of confidence and accuracy; in particular, a shared reliance on post-decisional processing within the systems responsible for the initial decision. However, research in both fields has focused rather narrowly on simple, discrete decisions—reflecting the correspondingly restricted focus of current models of the decision process itself—raising doubts about the degree to which discovered principles will scale up to explain metacognitive evaluation of real-world decisions and actions that are fluid, temporally extended, and embedded in the broader context of evolving behavioural goals.
Highlights
People are capable of robust evaluations of their decisions: they are often aware of their mistakes even without explicit feedback, and report levels of confidence in their decisions that correlate with objective performance
Can we incorporate decision confidence into the formal framework offered by the DDM and other quantitative models of perceptual choice? In what follows, we review recent empirical and modelling work that has attempted to extend this formal framework to account for metacognitive judgements
This review suggests that the current debate between decisional locus and post-decisional models of decision confidence will very likely be resolved in favour of the latter, but that even these post-decisional theories will need modification to accommodate evidence that metacognitive awareness cannot be reduced to post-decision processing—the two are at least partly dissociable
Summary
People are often aware of their own mistakes; for example, in choice RT tasks when time pressure is applied to induce errors in simple judgements. In antisaccade tasks in which subjects correct all of their errors but detect only half of them, ERN amplitude is equivalent for aware and unaware errors, whereas the Pe is robustly observed only when subjects detect their errors [38] Taken together, these findings suggest that whereas the ERN directly indexes automatic post-decision processes leading to rapid error correction, the later Pe is selectively associated with explicit detection and signalling of errors. These findings suggest that whereas the ERN directly indexes automatic post-decision processes leading to rapid error correction, the later Pe is selectively associated with explicit detection and signalling of errors These results provide converging evidence for the view that error correction and detection reflect distinct processes. The ERN and Pe typically covary across conditions and, when the two components are dissociated, post-error adjustments are only observed following detected errors on which a Pe component is present [38], suggesting that the latter may be a more direct correlate of the learning mechanisms by which future behaviour is adapted following an error
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