Empirical evidence indicates that people can provide accurate evaluations of their own thoughts and actions by means of both error detection and confidence judgments. This study investigates the foundations of these metacognitive abilities, specifically focusing on the relationship between confidence and error judgments in human perceptual decision making. Electroencephalography studies have identified the error positivity (Pe)-an event-related component observed following incorrect choices-as a robust neural index of participants' awareness of their errors in simple decision tasks. Here we assessed whether the Pe also varies in a graded way with participants' subjective ratings of decision confidence, as expressed on a 6-point scale after each trial of a dot count perceptual decision task. We observed clear, graded modulation of the Pe by confidence, with monotonic reduction in Pe amplitude associated with increasing confidence in the preceding choice. This effect was independent of objective accuracy. Multivariate decoding analyses indicated that neural markers of error detection were predictive of varying levels of confidence in correct decisions, including subtle shifts in highconfidence trials. These results suggest that shared mechanisms underlie two forms of metacognitive evaluation that are often treated separately, with consequent implications for current theories of their neurocognitive basis.

HighlightsWe propose a ‘dual systems’ framework for thinking about metacognition.System 1 metacognition is for ‘intra-personal’ cognitive control.System 2 metacognition is for ‘supra-personal’ cognitive control.The latter allows agents to share metacognitive representations.This sharing creates benefits for the group and facilitates cumulative culture.

There is currently little direct evidence regarding the function of subjective confidence in decision making: The tight correlation between objective accuracy and subjective confidence makes it difficult to distinguish each variable's unique contribution. Here, we created conditions in a perceptual decision task that were matched in accuracy but differed in subjective evaluation of accuracy by orthogonally varying the strength versus variability of evidence. Confidence was reduced with variable (vs. weak) evidence, even across conditions matched for difficulty. Building on this dissociation, we constructed a paradigm in which participants ( N = 20) could choose to seek further information before making their decision. The data provided clear support for the hypothesis that subjective confidence predicts information seeking in decision making: Participants were more likely to sample additional information before giving a response in the condition with low confidence, despite matched accuracy. In a preregistered replication ( N = 50), these findings were replicated with increased task difficulty levels.

Human observers effortlessly and accurately judge their probability of being correct in their decisions, suggesting that metacognitive evaluation is an integral part of decision making. It remains a challenge for most models of confidence, however, to explain how metacognitive judgments are formed and which internal signals influence them. While the decision-making literature has suggested that confidence is based on privileged access to the evidence that gives rise to the decision itself, other lines of research on confidence have commonly taken the view of a multicue model of confidence. The present study aims at manipulating one such cue: the perceived reliability of evidence supporting an initial decision. Participants made a categorical judgment of the average color of an array of eight colored shapes, for which we critically manipulated both the distance of the mean color from the category boundary (evidence strength) and the variability of colors across the eight shapes (evidence reliability). Our results indicate that evidence reliability has a stronger impact on confidence than evidence strength. Specifically, we found that evidence reliability affects metacognitive readout, the mapping from subjectively experienced certainty to expressed confidence, allowing participants to adequately adjust their confidence ratings to match changes in objective task performance across conditions.

Decisions are usually accompanied by a feeling of being wrong or right – a subjective confidence estimate. But what information is this confidence estimate based on, and what is confidence used for? To answer these questions, research has largely focused on confidence regarding current or past decisions, for example identifying how characteristics of the stimulus affect confidence, how confidence can be used as an internally generated feedback signal, and how communicating confidence can affect group decisions. Here, we report two studies which implemented a novel metacognitive measure: predictions of confidence for future perceptual decisions. Using computational modeling of behaviour and EEG, we established that experience-based confidence predictions are one source of information that affects how confident we are in future decision-making, and that learned confidence-expectations affect neural preparation for future decisions. Results from both studies show that participants develop precise confidence predictions informed by past confidence experience. Notably, our results also show that confidence predictions affect performance confidence rated after a decision is made; this finding supports the proposal that confidence judgments are based on multiple sources of information, including expectations. We found strong support for this link in neural correlates of stimulus preparation and processing. EEG measures of preparatory neural activity (contingent negative variation; CNV) and evidence accumulation (centro-parietal positivity; CPP) show that predicted confidence affects neural preparation for stimulus processing, supporting the proposal that one purpose of confidence judgments may be to learn about performance for future encounters and prepare accordingly.

BackgroundCognitive offloading is the use of physical action to reduce the cognitive demands of a task. Everyday memory relies heavily on this practice; for example, when we write down to-be-remembered information or use diaries, alerts, and reminders to trigger delayed intentions. A key goal of recent research has been to investigate the processes that trigger cognitive offloading. This research has demonstrated that individuals decide whether or not to offload based on a potentially erroneous metacognitive evaluation of their mental abilities. Therefore, improving the accuracy of metacognitive evaluations may help to optimise offloading behaviour. However, previous studies typically measure participants’ use of an explicitly instructed offloading strategy, in contrast to everyday life where offloading strategies must often be generated spontaneously.ResultsWe administered a computer-based task requiring participants to remember delayed intentions. One group of participants was explicitly instructed on a method for setting external reminders; another was not. The latter group spontaneously set reminders but did so less often than the instructed group. Offloading improved performance in both groups. Crucially, metacognition (confidence in unaided memory ability) guided both instructed and spontaneous offloading: Participants in both groups set more reminders when they were less confident (regardless of actual memory ability).ConclusionsThese results show that the link between metacognition and cognitive offloading holds even when offloading strategies need to be spontaneously generated. Thus, metacognitive interventions are potentially able to alter offloading behaviour, without requiring offloading strategies to be explicitly instructed.

Theoretical work predicts that decisions made with low confidence should lead to increased information-seeking. This is an adaptive strategy because it can increase the quality of a decision, and previous behavioral work has shown that decision-makers engage in such confidence-driven information-seeking. The present study aimed to characterize the neural markers that mediate the relationship between confidence and information-seeking. A paradigm was used in which 17 human participants (9 male) made an initial perceptual decision, and then decided whether or not they wanted to sample more evidence before committing to a final decision and confidence judgment. Predecisional and postdecisional event-related potential components were similarly modulated by the level of confidence and by information-seeking choices. Time-resolved multivariate decoding of scalp EEG signals first revealed that both information-seeking choices and decision confidence could be decoded from the time of the initial decision to the time of the subsequent information-seeking choice (within-condition decoding). No above-chance decoding was visible in the preresponse time window. Crucially, a classifier trained to decode high versus low confidence predicted information-seeking choices after the initial perceptual decision (across-condition decoding). This time window corresponds to that of a postdecisional neural marker of confidence. Collectively, our findings demonstrate, for the first time, that neural indices of confidence are functionally involved in information-seeking decisions.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Despite substantial current interest in neural signatures of our sense of confidence, it remains largely unknown how confidence is used to regulate behavior. Here, we devised a task in which human participants could decide whether or not to sample additional decision-relevant information at a small monetary cost. Using neural recordings, we could predict such information-seeking choices based on a neural signature of decision confidence. Our study illuminates a neural link between decision confidence and adaptive behavioral control.

Uncertainty is ubiquitous in cognitive processing. In this study, we aim to investigate the ability agents possess to track and report the noise inherent in their mental operations, often in the form of confidence judgments. Here, we argue that humans can use uncertainty inherent in their representations of value beliefs to arbitrate between exploration and exploitation. Such uncertainty is reflected in explicit confidence judgments. Using a novel variant of a multi-armed bandit paradigm, we studied how beliefs were formed and how uncertainty in the encoding of these value beliefs (belief confidence) evolved over time. We found that people used uncertainty to arbitrate between exploration and exploitation, reflected in a higher tendency toward exploration when their confidence in their value representations was low. We furthermore found that value uncertainty can be linked to frameworks of metacognition in decision making in two ways. First, belief confidence drives decision confidence, i.e. people’s evaluation of their own choices. Second, individuals with higher metacognitive insight into their choices were also better at tracing the uncertainty in their environment. Together, these findings argue that such uncertainty representations play a key role in the context of cognitive control.