Recent evidence of unconscious working memory challenges the notion that only visible stimuli can be actively maintained over time. In the present study, we investigated the neural dynamics underlying the maintenance of variably visible stimuli using magnetoencephalography. Subjects had to detect and mentally maintain the orientation of a masked grating. We show that the stimulus is fully encoded in early brain activity independently of visibility reports. However, the presence and orientation of the target are actively maintained throughout the brief retention period, even when the stimulus is reported as unseen. Source and decoding analyses revealed that perceptual maintenance recruits a hierarchical network spanning the early visual, temporal, parietal, and frontal cortices. Importantly, the representations coded in the late processing stages of this network specifically predicted visibility reports. These unexpected results challenge several theories of consciousness and suggest that invisible information can be briefly maintained within the higher processing stages of visual perception.

When deciding whether or not to bring an umbrella to work, your confidence will be influenced by the sky outside the window (direct evidence) as well as by, for example, whether or not people walking in the street have their own umbrella (indirect or contingent evidence). These 2 distinct aspects of decision confidence have not yet been assessed independently within the same framework. Here we study the relative contributions of stimulus-specific and social-contingent information on confidence formation. Dyads of participants made visual perceptual decisions, first individually and then together by sharing their wagers in their decisions. We independently manipulated the sensory evidence and the social consensus available to participants and found that both type of evidence contributed to wagers. Consistent with previous work, the amount people were prepared to wager covaried with the strength of sensory evidence. However, social agreements and disagreement affected wagers in opposite directions and asymmetrically. These different contributions of sensory and social evidence to wager were linearly additive. Moreover, average metacognitive sensitivity—namely the association between wagers and accuracy—between interacting dyad members positively correlated with dyadic performance and dyadic benefit above average individual performance. Our results provide a general framework that accounts for how both social context and direct sensory evidence contribute to decision confidence.

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In a world where ideas flow freely across multiple platforms, people must often rely on others' advice and opinions without an objective standard to judge whether this information is accurate. The present study explores the hypothesis that an individual's internal decision confidence can be used as a signal to learn the accuracy of others' advice, even in the absence of feedback. According to this "agreement-inconfidence" hypothesis, people can learn about an advisor's accuracy across multiple interactions according to whether the advice offered agrees with their own initial opinions, weighted by the confidence with which these initial opinions are held. We test this hypothesis using a judge-advisor system paradigm to precisely manipulate the profiles of virtual advisors in a perceptual decision-making task. We find that when advisors' and participants' judgments are independent, people can correctly learn advisors' features, like their accuracy and calibration, whether or not objective feedback is available. However, when their judgments (and thus errors) are correlated-as is the case in many real social contexts-predictable distortions in trust can be observed between feedback and feedback-free scenarios. Using agent-based simulations, we explore implications of these individual-level heuristics for networklevel patterns of trust and belief formation.