Aurelio Cortese: Metacognition as the detection of internal signals

Mini-symposium “QB3:Qualia, Brain, Body, Behavior”
bicr.atr.jp/decnef/mini-sympo...
2024 Jan 15
Aurelio Cortese
Title: Metacognition as the detection of internal signals
Abstract:
Metacognition is the ability to reflect upon and estimate the quality of our decisions. This talk will cover our recent (published and unpublished) work in which we sought to understand the different neural and behavioural components of metacognitive ability. I will first discuss the foundation of metacognition in relation to consciousness, decision-making and neural computations. Then, I will focus on the hypothesis that detection tasks may share a common mechanism and neural substrate with metacognitive judgments. To this end, we developed a within-subject, performance-matched design with identical stimuli and trial structure across detection and discrimination tasks. During the detection task, participants had to assess the presence or absence of a coherent movement in a random dot kinetogram. Instead, during the discrimination task, participants had to determine the direction of motion. Metacognitive ability was assessed using confidence ratings on the correctness of the choice. Cross-decoding analyses revealed shared neural representations of confidence across tasks and activity patterns in the prefrontal cortex that readily generalise predictions between detection responses and confidence judgments. Further, we found evidence of conserved activity motifs across participants reflecting confidence, most strongly in the prefrontal cortex and basal ganglia. Our findings shed light on the neural substrates of metacognition and provide a way forward to investigate metacognition across contexts/tasks.