Evaluation of self-generated behavior: untangling metacognitive read-out and error detection

Abstract

words, max 250) 16When producing a duration, for instance by pressing a key for one second, the brain relies on self-17 generated neuronal dynamics to monitor the "flow of time". Converging evidence has suggested that 18 the brain can also monitor itself monitoring time. Here, we investigated which brain mechanisms 19 support metacognitive inferences when self-generating timing behavior. Although studies have 20shown that participants can reliably detect temporal errors when generating a duration (Akdogan & 21 Balci, 2017;Kononowicz et al., 2017), the neural bases underlying the evaluation and the monitoring 22 SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT (98, max 120 words) 1 2 When typing on a keyboard, the brain estimates where the finger should land, but also when. The 3 endogenous generation of the when in time is naturally accompanied by timing errors which, quite 4 remarkably, participants can accurately rate as being too short or too long, and also by how much. 5Here, we explored the brain mechanisms supporting such temporal metacognitive inferences. For 6 this, we contrasted two working hypotheses (error-detection vs. read-out), and showed that the 7 pattern of evoked and oscillatory brain activity parsimoniously accounted best for a read-out 8 mechanism. Our results suggest the existence of meta-representations of time estimates. 9 10 11