Neural activity tracking identity and confidence in social information

Abstract

Humans learn about the environment either directly by interacting with it or indirectly by seeking information about it from social sources such as conspecifics. The degree of confidence in the information obtained through either route should determine the impact that it has on adapting and changing behaviour. We examined whether and how behavioural and neural computations differ during non-social learning as opposed to learning from social sources. Trial-wise confidence judgments about non-social and social information sources offered a window into this learning process. Despite matching exactly the statistical features of social and non-social conditions, confidence judgments were more accurate and less changeable when they were made about social as opposed to non-social information sources. In addition to subjective reports of confidence, differences were also apparent in the Bayesian estimates of participants' subjective beliefs. Univariate activity in dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) and posterior temporo-parietal junction (pTPJ) more closely tracked confidence about social as opposed to non-social information sources. In addition, the multivariate patterns of activity in the same areas encoded identities of social information sources compared to non-social information sources.

Causal role of a neural system for separating and selecting multidimensional social cognitive information

“… 19 Neural representations within this region also typically carry more detailed information about social compared with non-social stimuli. 20 , 21 …”

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

“…Finally, a prominent source of global self-beliefs may be observing others perform the same task, to allow a prior to be developed about our own likely chance of success. Understanding this social aspect of global metacognition will benefit from a more detailed understanding of how we infer confidence in the decisions of others (Bang et al, 2022;Boorman et al, 2013;Patel et al, 2012;Trudel et al, 2021;Wittmann et al, 2016).…”

“…So far, these studies have used off-the-shelf metrics of mindreading and metacognitive efficiency, with limited attempt to relate the shared computations underpinning self-and other-directed processes (although see Bang et al, 2022;Patel et al, 2012;Trudel et al, 2021). A profitable avenue of research, then, would be to consider how we build both local and global metacognitive estimates of our own and others performance across a number of distinct domains.…”