Understanding how people rate their confidence is critical for characterizing a wide range of perceptual, memory, motor, and cognitive processes. To enable the continued exploration of these processes, we created a large database of confidence studies spanning a broad set of paradigms, participant populations, and fields of study. The data from each study are structured in a common,

Modulation of frontal lobes activity is believed to be an important pathway trough which the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis stress response impacts cognitive and emotional functioning. Here, we investigate the effects of stress on metacognition, which is the ability to monitor and control one's own cognition. As the frontal lobes have been shown to play a critical role in metacognition, we predicted that under activation of the HPA axis, participants should be less accurate in the assessment of their own performances in a perceptual decision task, irrespective of the effect of stress on the first order perceptual decision itself. To test this prediction, we constituted three groups of high, medium and low stress responders based on cortisol concentration in saliva in response to a standardized psycho-social stress challenge (the Trier Social Stress Test). We then assessed the accuracy of participants' confidence judgments in a visual discrimination task. As predicted, we found that high biological reactivity to stress correlates with lower sensitivity in metacognition. In sum, participants under stress know less when they know and when they do not know.

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Despite the tangible progress in psychological and cognitive sciences over the last several years, the discipline still trails other more mature sciences in identifying the most important questions that need to be solved. Reaching such consensus could lead to greater synergy across disciplines, faster progress, and increased focus on solving important problems rather than pursuing isolated, niche efforts. Here, 26 researchers from the field of visual metacognition reached consensus on four long-term and two medium-term goals for our field. We describe the process that we followed, the goals themselves, and our plans for accomplishing these goals. If the next few years prove this effort successful, such consensus-building around common goals could be adopted more widely in psychological science.

Despite the tangible progress in psychological and cognitive sciences over the last several years, these disciplines still trail other more mature sciences in identifying the most important questions that need to be solved. Reaching such consensus could lead to greater synergy across different laboratories, faster progress, and increased focus on solving important problems rather than pursuing isolated, niche efforts. Here, 26 researchers from the field of visual metacognition reached consensus on four long-term and two medium-term common goals. We describe the process that we followed, the goals themselves, and our plans for accomplishing these goals. If this effort proves successful within the next few years, such consensus building around common goals could be adopted more widely in psychological science.

It is well established that acute stress produces negative effects on high level cognitive functions. However, these effects could be due to the physiological components of the stress response (among which cortisol secretion is prominent), to its psychological concomitants (the thoughts generated by the stressor) or to any combination of those. Our study shows for the first time that the typical cortisol response to stress is sufficient to impair metacognition, that is the ability to monitor one's own performance in a task. In a pharmacological protocol, we administered either 20 mg hydrocortisone or placebo to 46 male participants, and measured their subjective perception of stress, their performance in a perceptual task, and their metacognitive ability. We found that hydrocortisone selectively impaired metacognitive ability, without affecting task performance or creating a subjective state of stress. In other words, the single physiological response of stress produces a net effect on metacognition. These results inform our basic understanding of the physiological bases of metacognition. they are also relevant for applied or clinical research about situations involving stress, anxiety, depression, or simply cortisol use. The negative impact of stress on human higher-order cognition is now well documented in cognitive neuroscience 1. In particular, acute stress alters executive functions engaging the prefrontal cortex 2 , such as decision-making 3-5 , attention 6 , working memory 7-9 , learning 10,11 or cognitive flexibility 12. However, stress may affect cognition via multiple channels, which remain to be disentangled. At the physiological level, it is now well known that stress leads to a cascade of neuromodulator production, all of which impact brain functions, with a fast release of catecholamines (noradrenaline, dopamine, and then adrenaline) and a slower cortisol response very specific to stress 13,14. These endocrine changes prepare the body to "fight or flight", affecting breathing, heart rate, blood pressure, but also reducing prefrontal control, while enhancing amygdala function 2,13. Another channel must be considered though, by which stress affects cognition via psychological factors, associated with how individuals perceive the situation and how they react to it (e.g., rumination 15). Therefore, to evaluate the net effects of the biological components of stress (e.g. cortisol) on cognition, one should separate them from the psychological effects associated with the stress induction paradigm. In this study, we aim at doing so by using a pharmacological approach. Within higher order cognitive functions, we focus on metacognition. This process refers to the ability to assess one's own mental states 16 , for instance by evaluating the confidence that our own decisions are correct. Literature in this field has mainly focused on the cognitive determinants and neural bases of metacognition 17 , pointing to the key role of prefrontal cortex 18,19. Two recent studies suggest that acute stress would impact met...

The success of human cooperation crucially depends on mechanisms enabling individuals to detect unreliability in their conspecifics. Yet, how such epistemic vigilance is achieved from naturalistic sensory inputs remains unclear. Here we show that listeners’ perceptions of the certainty and honesty of other speakers from their speech are based on a common prosodic signature. Using a data-driven method, we separately decode the prosodic features driving listeners’ perceptions of a speaker’s certainty and honesty across pitch, duration and loudness. We find that these two kinds of judgments rely on a common prosodic signature that is perceived independently from individuals’ conceptual knowledge and native language. Finally, we show that listeners extract this prosodic signature automatically, and that this impacts the way they memorize spoken words. These findings shed light on a unique auditory adaptation that enables human listeners to quickly detect and react to unreliability during linguistic interactions.