Noradrenaline blockade specifically enhances metacognitive performance.

Tobias U Hauser,Raymond J Dolan,Michael Moutoussis,Micah Allen,Geraint Rees,Nina Purg

doi:10.7554/elife.24901

Tobias U Hauser, Raymond J Dolan + Show 4 more

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https://doi.org/10.7554/elife.24901

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Abstract

Impairments in metacognition, the ability to accurately report one's performance, are common in patients with psychiatric disorders, where a putative neuromodulatory dysregulation provides the rationale for pharmacological interventions. Previously, we have shown how unexpected arousal modulates metacognition (Allen et al., 2016). Here, we report a double-blind, placebo-controlled, study that examined specific effects of noradrenaline and dopamine on both metacognition and perceptual decision making. Signal theoretic analysis of a global motion discrimination task with adaptive performance staircasing revealed that noradrenergic blockade (40 mg propranolol) significantly increased metacognitive performance (type-II area under the curve, AUROC2), but had no impact on perceptual decision making performance. Blockade of dopamine D2/3 receptors (400 mg amisulpride) had no effect on either metacognition or perceptual decision making. Our study is the first to show a pharmacological enhancement of metacognitive performance, in the absence of any effect on perceptual decision making. This enhancement points to a regulatory role for noradrenergic neurotransmission in perceptual metacognition.

Highlights

The neurocognitive mechanisms from which confidence, and metacognitive ability in general, arise are ill understood
Impaired metacognition is reported in psychiatric disorders (Frith, 1992; Knouse et al, 2005; Lysaker et al, 2010; Wells, 2011; Hauser et al, 2017), and its pharmacological remediation could provide a target for treatment (Wells, 2011)
We show that inhibition of central noradrenaline function enhances perceptual metacognitive ability

Summary

Introduction

The neurocognitive mechanisms from which confidence, and metacognitive ability in general, arise are ill understood. While classic accounts see confidence as a mere extension of a perceptual sampling process (Kiani and Shadlen, 2009; Pleskac and Busemeyer, 2010; Meyniel et al, 2015; Moran et al, 2015), other evidence points to a non-trivial relationship between decision making and confidence that invoke distinct decision making and metacognitive processes (Fleming et al, 2010; Fleming and Dolan, 2012; Allen et al, 2016; Allen et al, 2017). We provided evidence that arousal can bias metacognition independently of decision accuracy (Allen et al, 2016), in accordance with other studies showing confidence-accuracy dissociations (Fleming et al, 2015; Spence et al, 2016) and suggested that these biases might be under neuromodulatory control via neural gain (Eldar et al, 2013; Hauser et al, 2016)

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