Diffusion property and functional connectivity of superior longitudinal fasciculus underpin human metacognition

Abstract

Metacognition as the capacity of monitoring one's own cognition operates across domains.Here, we addressed whether metacognition in different cognitive domains rely on common or distinct neural substrates with combined diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) techniques. After acquiring DTI and resting-state fMRI data, we asked participants to perform a temporal-order memory task and a perceptual discrimination task, followed by trial-specific confidence judgments. DTI analysis revealed that the structural integrity (indexed by fractional anisotropy) in the anterior portion of right superior longitudinal fasciculus (SLF) was associated with both perceptual and mnemonic metacognitive abilities. Using perturbed mnemonic metacognitive scores produced by inhibiting the precuneus using TMS, the mnemonic metacognition scores did not correlate with individuals' SLF structural integrity anymore, revealing the relevance of this tract in memory metacognition. In order to further verify the involvement of several cortical regions connected by SLF, we took the TMS-targeted precuneus region as a seed in a functional connectivity analysis and found the functional connectivity between precuneus and two SLF-connected regions (inferior parietal cortex and precentral gyrus) differentially mediated mnemonic but not perceptual metacognition performance. These results illustrate the importance of SLF and a putative white-matter grey-matter circuitry that supports human metacognition.

Analysis of Brain Structural Connectivity Networks and White Matter Integrity in Patients With Mild Cognitive Impairment

“…This is further consistent with studies showing decreased functional connectivity in the frontoparietal network, concomitant with altered connectivity in the default mode network, in both AD (Zhao et al, 2019) and older adults with subtle cognitive impairment (Zanchi et al, 2017). It is important to note that the SLF plays an important role in language (Madhavan et al, 2014), attention (Mesulam, 1981), and memory (Zheng et al, 2021). While no connectivity increases (for MCI) were observed across t-value thresholds, effect-size analysis identified two pairs of nodes with higher connectivity in MCI (L.LOFG-L.FP and R.LOFG-R.TH).…”

Elucidating the underlying components of metacognitive systematic bias in the human dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and inferior parietal cortex

“…In particular, it seems to play a more significant role in overestimation biases compared to underestimation biases, resulting in stronger activation and, consequently, higher decoding accuracy. This result not only corroborates the hypothesis of the involvement of the precuneus in metacognition processes 48 , 49 , but also strengthens the view of a domain-specificity in the assessment of metacognition 12 .…”

The future of metacognition research: balancing construct breadth with measurement rigor

“…The elegance of the approach is that meta-d' is in the same units as observed first-order performance (d'), and thus a performance-controlled metric of metacognitive capacity, known as metacognitive efficiency, can be derived as the ratio between these two parameters (meta-d'/d'), often referred to as Mratio. For this reason, Mratio is considered a gold-standard metric and has been widely used in empirical studies, including in identifying neural correlates of metacognition (e.g., McCurdy et al, 2013;Shekhar & Rahnev, 2018;Ye et al, 2018;Zheng et al, 2021), studying the domain generality of metacognitive efficiency (e.g., Fitzgerald et al, 2017;Mazancieux et al, 2020;Morales et al, 2018) and quantifying the effects of metacognitive training (e.g., Carpenter et al, 2019;Rouy et al, 2022).…”