Topic: confidence

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

Human behavior is known to be idiosyncratic, yet research in neuroscience typically assumes a universal brain-behavior relationship. Here we test this assumption by estimating the level of idiosyncrasy by compare two different aspects of brain function: task- and behavior-based activation. Human subjects (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

Convolutional neural networks currently provide the best models of biological vision. However, their decision behavior, including the facts that they are deterministic and use equal number of computations for easy and difficult stimuli, differs markedly from human decision-making, thus limiting their applicability as models of human perceptual behavior. Here we develop a new neural network, RTNet, that generates stochastic decisions and human-like response time (RT) distributions, and also reproduces all foundational 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

Electrophysiological recordings during perceptual decision tasks 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.

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