Metacognition for past and future decision making in primates
As Socrates said that "I know that I know nothing," our mind's function to be aware of our ignorance is essential for abstract and conceptual reasoning. However, the biological mechanism to enable such a hierarchical thought, or meta-cognition, remained unknown. In the first part of the talk, I will demonstrate our studies on the neural mechanism for metacognition on memory in macaque monkeys. In reality, awareness of ignorance is essential not only for the retrospection of the past but also for the exploration of novel unfamiliar environments for the future. However, this proactive feature of metacognition has been understated in neuroscience. In the second part of the talk, I will demonstrate our studies on the neural mechanism for prospective metacognitive matching among uncertain options prior to perceptual decision making in humans and monkeys. These studies converge to suggest that higher-order processes to self-evaluate mental state either retrospectively or prospectively are implemented in the primate neural networks.
Male songbirds turn off their self-evaluation systems when they sing to females
Attending to mistakes while practicing alone provides opportunities for learning but self-evaluation during audience-directed performance could distract from ongoing execution. It remains unknown how animals switch between practice and performance modes, and how evaluation systems process errors across distinct performance contexts. We recorded from striatal-projecting dopamine (DA) neurons as male songbirds transitioned from singing alone to singing female-directed courtship song. In the presence of the female, singing-related performance error signals were reduced or gated off and DA neurons were instead phasically activated by female vocalizations. Mesostriatal DA neurons can thus dynamically change their tuning with changes in social context.