Domain-specific impairment in metacognitive accuracy following anterior prefrontal lesions

Fleming, Stephen M.; Ryu, Jihye; Golfinos, John G.; Blackmon, Karen

doi:10.1093/brain/awu221

Cited by 302 publications

(370 citation statements)

References 83 publications

(137 reference statements)

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“…Arguably, the applied task may not have tapped into the full content of the Presence Module, which also encompassed interoception and metacognitive awareness (44). Monitoring and metaawareness-related processing could be in line with thickening in the medial PFC, a region suggested by cross-sectional studies to participate in these functions (66)(67)(68).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 71%

Structural plasticity of the social brain: Differential change after socio-affective and cognitive mental training

Valk¹,

Bernhardt²,

Trautwein³

et al. 2017

Preprint

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Although neuroscientific research has revealed experience-dependent brain changes across the life span in sensory, motor, and cognitive domains, plasticity relating to social capacities remains largely unknown. To investigate whether the targeted mental training of different cognitive and social skills can induce specific changes in brain morphology, we collected longitudinal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data throughout a 9-month mental training intervention from a large sample of adults between 20 and 55 years of age. By means of various daily mental exercises and weekly instructed group sessions, training protocols specifically addressed three functional domains: (i) mindfulness-based attention and interoception, (ii) socio-affective skills (compassion, dealing with difficult emotions, and prosocial motivation), and (iii) socio-cognitive skills (cognitive perspective-taking on self and others and metacognition). MRIbased cortical thickness analyses, contrasting the different training modules against each other, indicated spatially diverging changes in cortical morphology. Training of present-moment focused attention mostly led to increases in cortical thickness in prefrontal regions, socio-affective training induced plasticity in frontoinsular regions, and sociocognitive training included change in inferior frontal and lateral temporal cortices. Module-specific structural brain changes correlated with training-induced behavioral improvements in the same individuals in domain-specific measures of attention, compassion, and cognitive perspective-taking, respectively, and overlapped with task-relevant functional networks. Our longitudinal findings indicate structural plasticity in well-known socio-affective and socio-cognitive brain networks in healthy adults based on targeted short daily mental practices. These findings could promote the development of evidence-based mental training interventions in clinical, educational, and corporate settings aimed at cultivating social intelligence, prosocial motivation, and cooperation.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 71%

Structural plasticity of the social brain: Differential change after socio-affective and cognitive mental training

Valk¹,

Bernhardt²,

Trautwein³

et al. 2017

Preprint

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“…Importantly, the diverse connectivity profile of pgACC is consistent with this area as central to the formation of local and global estimates of probability correct: pgACC is connected to surrounding medial prefrontal cortex, dorsolateral and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, cingulate cortex, subcortical areas, such as hippocampus and striatum, and posterior areas, including parietal cortex (31). These findings may help explain why metacognition, the ability to monitor and evaluate the success of one's performance, is often impaired after prefrontal lesions and/or degeneration (32)(33)(34)(35). If pgACC is indeed critical for confidence formation, compromising pgACC, or connections to and/or from pgACC, should naturally lead to discrepancies between subjective evaluations and objective performance.…”

Section: Cc-by-nc-nd 40 International License Not Peer-reviewed) Is mentioning

confidence: 63%

Distinct encoding of decision confidence in human medial prefrontal cortex

Bang

Fleming

2018

Preprint

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Our confidence in a choice and the reliability of evidence pertaining to that choice appear to be inseparable quantities. However, recent computational frameworks suggest that the brain should encode distinct estimates of these quantities for adaptive behavioural control. Consider a line judge in a tennis match deciding whether a ball is out. When the ball is moving quickly, the sensory signal is unreliable. Nevertheless, if the ball lands far from the line, a decision may be easy and confidence high. Decision confidence should reflect the probability that a choice is correct and must therefore, unlike other estimates of certainty such as evidence reliability, be flexibly conditioned on a choice. Here we devised a psychophysical approach to decouple confidence in a sensory choice from the reliability of the sensory evidence upon which a choice is based. Using human fMRI, we observed that an area in medial prefrontal cortex (perigenual cingulate cortex, pgACC) tracked probability correct, the normative definition of decision confidence, whereas neural areas previously thought to track decision confidence, such as ventral striatum and posterior parietal cortex, instead tracked sensory reliability. We show that pgACC activity does not simply co-vary with objective performance but is also linked to withinsubject and between-subject variation in a subjective sense of decision confidence. Our study is consistent with the recent proposal that the brain separately maintains choice-dependent and choice-independent estimates of certainty, and sheds light on why dysfunctional confidence estimates often emerge following prefrontal lesions and/or degeneration.

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“…the ability to discriminate correct responses from guesses on a trial-by-trial basis, Baird et al (2013) found no correlation between perceptual and mnemonic tasks (though see McCurdy et al, 2013, for a different result), and Fleming, Ryu, Golfinos, and Blackmon (2014) provided neuropsychological evidence for a dissociation between sensitivity in the two domains. In the present study, although metacognitive sensitivity generalized across the two perceptual tasks, it was unrelated to any measure from the delayed intention task.…”

Section: Domain-specificity Of Metacognitionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Strategic use of reminders: Influence of both domain-general and task-specific metacognitive confidence, independent of objective memory ability

Gilbert

2015

Consciousness and Cognition

136

229

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How do we decide whether to use external artifacts and reminders to remember delayed intentions, versus relying on unaided memory? Experiment 1 (N=400) showed that participants' choice to forgo reminders in an experimental task was independently predicted by subjective confidence and objective ability, even when the two measures were themselves uncorrelated. Use of reminders improved performance, explaining significant variance in intention fulfilment even after controlling for unaided ability. Experiment 2 (N=303) additionally investigated a pair of unrelated perceptual discrimination tasks, where the confidence and sensitivity of metacognitive judgments was decorrelated from objective performance using a staircase procedure. Participants with lower confidence in their perceptual judgments set more reminders in the delayed-intention task, even though confidence was unrelated to objective accuracy. However, memory confidence was a better predictor of reminder setting. Thus, propensity to set reminders was independently influenced by (a) domain-general metacognitive confidence; (b) task-specific confidence; and (c) objective ability.

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Domain-specific impairment in metacognitive accuracy following anterior prefrontal lesions

Cited by 302 publications

References 83 publications

Structural plasticity of the social brain: Differential change after socio-affective and cognitive mental training

Structural plasticity of the social brain: Differential change after socio-affective and cognitive mental training

Distinct encoding of decision confidence in human medial prefrontal cortex

Strategic use of reminders: Influence of both domain-general and task-specific metacognitive confidence, independent of objective memory ability

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