Consciousness remains a formidable challenge. Different theories of consciousness have proposed different mechanisms to account for phenomenal experience. Here, appealing to Global Workspace Theory, Higher-Order Theories, Social Theories, and Predictive Processing, we introduce a novel framework -the Self-Organizing Metarerpresentational Account (SOMA), in which consciousness is viewed as something that the brain learns to do. The brain continuously and unconsciously learns to redescribe its own activity to itself, so developing systems of metarepresentations that qualify target first-order representations. Experiences only occur in experiencers that have learned to know they possess certain first-order states and that have learned to care more about certain states than about others. Thus, consciousness is the brain's (unconscious, embodied, enactive, non-conceptual) theory about itself.

Metacognitive abilities allow us to adjust ongoing behavior and modify future decisions in the absence of external feedback. Although metacognition is critical in many daily life settings, it remains unclear what information is actually being monitored and what kind of information is being used for metacognitive decisions. In the present study, we investigated whether response information connected to perceptual events contribute to metacognitive decision-making. Therefore, we recorded EEG signals during a perceptual color discrimination task while participants were asked to provide an estimate about the quality of their decision on each trial. Critically, the moment participants provided their confidence judgments varied across conditions, thereby changing the amount of action information (e.g., response competition or response fluency) available for metacognitive decisions. Results from three experiments demonstrate that metacognitive performance improved when firstorder action information was available at the moment metacognitive decisions about the perceptual task had to be provided. This behavioral effect was accompanied by enhanced functional connectivity (beta phase synchrony) between motor areas and prefrontal regions, exclusively observed during metacognitive decision-making. Our findings demonstrate that action information contributes to metacognitive decision-making, thereby painting a picture of metacognition as a process that integrates sensory evidence and information about our interactions with the world.

Monitoring and control of our decision process are key ingredients of adept decisionmaking. Such metacognitive abilities allow us to adjust ongoing behavior and modify future decisions in the absence of external feedback. Although metacognition is critical in many daily life settings, it remains unclear what information is actually being monitored and what kind of information is being used for metacognitive decisions. In the present study, we investigated whether response information connected to perceptual events contribute to metacognitive decision-making. Therefore, we recorded EEG signals during a perceptual color discrimination task while participants were asked to provide an estimate about the quality of their decision on each trial. Critically, the moment participants provided second-order decisions varied across conditions, thereby changing the amount of action information (e.g., response competition or response fluency) available for metacognitive decisions.Results from three experiments demonstrate that metacognitive performance improved when first-order action information was available at the moment metacognitive decisions about the perceptual task had to be provided. This behavioral effect was accompanied by enhanced functional connectivity (beta phase synchrony) between motor areas and prefrontal regions, exclusively observed during metacognitive decision-making. Our findings demonstrate that action information contributes to metacognitive decision-making, thereby painting a picture of metacognition as a secondorder process, integrating sensory evidence and the state of the decider during decisionmaking. SignificanceMonitoring and control of our decision process is a critical part of every day decisionmaking. When feedback is not available, metacognitive skills enable us to modify current behavior and adapt prospective decision-making. Here, we investigated what kind information is being used to compute an estimate about the quality of our decisions.Results demonstrate that during perceptual decision-making, information about one's actions towards perceptual events is being used to evaluate the quality of one's decisions. EEG results indicate that functional connectivity between motor regions and prefrontal cortex could serve as a mechanism to convey action information during metacognitive decision-making. Considered together, our results demonstrate that postdecisional information contributes to metacognition, thereby evaluating not only what one perceives (e.g., strength of perceptual evidence) but also how one responds towards perceptual events.

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