Behavioral, Modeling, and Electrophysiological Evidence for Supramodality in Human Metacognition

Abstract

Human metacognition, or the capacity to introspect on one's own mental states, has been mostly characterized through confidence reports in visual tasks. A pressing question is to what extent results from visual studies generalize to other domains. Answering this question allows determining whether metacognition operates through shared, supramodal mechanisms or through idiosyncratic, modality-specific mechanisms. Here, we report three new lines of evidence for decisional and postdecisional mechanisms arguing for the supramodality of metacognition. First, metacognitive efficiency correlated among auditory, tactile, visual, and audiovisual tasks. Second, confidence in an audiovisual task was best modeled using supramodal formats based on integrated representations of auditory and visual signals. Third, confidence in correct responses involved similar electrophysiological markers for visual and audiovisual tasks that are associated with motor preparation preceding the perceptual judgment. We conclude that the supramodality of metacognition relies on supramodal confidence estimates and decisional signals that are shared across sensory modalities. Metacognitive monitoring is the capacity to access, report, and regulate one's own mental states. In perception, this allows rating our confidence in what we have seen, heard, or touched. Although metacognitive monitoring can operate on different cognitive domains, we ignore whether it involves a single supramodal mechanism common to multiple cognitive domains or modality-specific mechanisms idiosyncratic to each domain. Here, we bring evidence in favor of the supramodality hypothesis by showing that participants with high metacognitive performance in one modality are likely to perform well in other modalities. Based on computational modeling and electrophysiology, we propose that supramodality can be explained by the existence of supramodal confidence estimates and by the influence of decisional cues on confidence estimates.

Affective Touch Dimensions: From Sensitivity to Metacognition

“…However, this is not always the case; one can have high overall confidence (e.g., a bias to provide high confidence ratings) that does not relate to correct responses, and vice-versa. Critically, although metacognitive measures have been applied to several modalities, with recent research arguing for the supramodality of metacognition, i.e., finding a correlation between visual, auditory, and tactile metacognitive efficiency (Faivre, Filevich, Solovey, Kühn, & Blanke, 2017), it still remains unknown whether these supramodal confidence findings extend to interoceptive signals, and whether any domain-specific processes also contribute to metacognition (Roualt et al, 2018).…”

Atypical spatial frequency dependence of visual metacognition among schizophrenia patients

“…Lastly, whether patients show atypicality in metacognitive performance with other sensory modalities such as auditory modality remains one important question to be examined, as hallucinations among patients with schizophrenia are even more prevalent in the auditory domain than the visual domain (59% and 27% prevalence, respectively) [42]. As a previous study demonstrated that one's metacognitive performance correlates across the sensory modalities [43], metacognitive function among patients may also show atypical dependence on some auditory conditions. Future studies may examine which stimulus properties in auditory domain, if any, may relate with atypical metacognitive performance.…”

Similar history biases for distinct prospective decisions of self-performance

“…31 Additional studies support the view that the precision of retrospective metacognitive judgments correlates across perceptual and memory tasks 32,33 and across sensory modalities. 34 Other studies have shown that observers use a similar confidence scale for different tasks of the same or different modality 35,36 and that confidence estimates on a given trial of a task carry-over to subsequent trial of a different task. 37 Across the two experiments of the present study, information related to visual awareness and response confidence on the most recent trials determines future prospective decision making, regardless of the type of prospective judgment (i.e.…”