Confidence

Decisions rely on integrating information across sensory systems and internal states. Single neurons in orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) typically encode relevant variables for making decisions such as sensory uncertainty and economic value. However, it is unclear whether this neural tuning is idiosyncratic to a specific behavioral context. We investigated to what extent encoding in OFC neural dynamics generalize across contexts, or are context-specific, by analyzing chronic Neuropixels recordings over consecutive sessions in which rats performed two related, but distinct, decision-making tasks. In

Metacognition has long been defined as “cognition about cognition”. One of its aspects is the error monitoring ability, which includes being aware of one’s own errors without external feedback. This ability is mostly investigated in two-alternative forced choice tasks, where the performance has all or none nature in terms of accuracy. The previous literature documents the effect of different influences on the error monitoring ability, such as working memory, feedback and sensorimotor involvement. However, these demonstrations fall short of generalizing to the real life scenarios where the erro

…(N=50) perform a perceptual task with confidence inside an MRI scanner. For each subject, task-based activation strength is estimated from blocks of 8 trials. We first show that task-based activation maps are both stable within an individual (r = 0.99) and similar across people (r = 0.59). Beh

…features of human accuracy, RT, and confidence. To test RTNet9s ability to pr

The placebo and nocebo effects highlight the importance of expectations in modulating pain perception. Yet, we don't need an external source of information to form expectations about pain. The brain can learn to predict pain in a more fundamental way, simply by experiencing fluctuating, non-random streams of noxious inputs, and extracting their temporal regularities. This process is called statistical learning. Here we address two key open questions: (1) does statistical learning modulate pain perception? and (2) is it affected in people with chronic musculoskeletal pain? In a first experiment

…in monkeys suggest that the degree of confidence in a decision is based on a simple neural signal produced by the neural decision process. Attractor neural networks provide an appropriate biophysical modeling framework, and account for the experimental results very well. However, it remains unclear whether attractor neural networks can account for confidence reports in humans. We present the results from an experiment in which participants are asked to perform an orientation discrimination task, followed by a confidence judgment.

Our scarcest resource is time. Humans and other animals allocate their time on a vast number of different activities – from reading a paper, pursuing a degree, or foraging for food. Optimal, reward-maximizing, behavioral strategies must balance expected future gains with irrecoverable time investment. However, humans and other animals often succumb to cognitive biases that lead to suboptimal payoffs such as considering sunk costs when investing time to obtain future payoffs. Here we argue that humans, rats, and mice invest time according to optimal predictions given available evidence and subj

Error monitoring refers to the ability to monitor one's own task performance without explicit feedback. This ability is studied typically in two-alternative forced-choice (2AFC) paradigms. Recent research showed that humans can also keep track of the magnitude and direction of errors in different magnitude domains (e.g., numerosity, duration, length). Based on the evidence that suggests a shared mechanism for magnitude representations, we aimed to investigate whether metric error monitoring ability is commonly governed across different magnitude domains. Participants reproduced/estimated tempo