Response-related signals increase confidence but not metacognitive performance

Abstract

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>Confidence judgements are a central tool for research in metacognition. In a typical task, participants first perform perceptual (first-order) decisions and then rate their confidence in these decisions. The relationship between confidence and first-order accuracy is taken as measure of metacognitive performance. Confidence is often assumed to stem from decision-monitoring processes alone, but processes that co-occur with the first-order decision may also play a role in confidence formation. In fact, across a broad range of tasks, trials with quick reaction times to the first-order task are often judged with relatively higher confidence than those with slow responses. This robust finding suggests that confidence could be informed by a readout of reaction times in addition to decision-monitoring processes. To test this possibility, we assessed the contribution of response-related signals to confidence and, in particular, to metacognitive performance (i.e., a measure of the adequacy of these confidence judgements). In a factorial design, we measured the effect of making an overt (vs. covert) decision, as well as the effect of pairing a motor action to the stimulus about which the first-order decision is made. Against our expectations, we found no differences in overall confidence or metacognitive performance when first-order responses were covert as opposed to overt. Further, actions paired to visual stimuli presented led to higher confidence ratings, but did not affect metacognitive performance. These results suggest that some of the relationships between first-order decisional signals and confidence might indeed be correlational, and attributable to an upstream cognitive process, common to the two of them.</jats:p>

Confidence in perceptual decision-making is preserved in schizophrenia

“…The weaker link between trajectories and confidence in schizophrenia may be related to slower and noisier motor behavior, or to the tendency of patients to neglect relevant internal cues to control motor actions (Frith, Blakemore, & Wolpert, 2000). The fact that metacognitive performance was preserved in schizophrenia despite a decreased link between confidence and trajectories suggest that sensorimotor signals may globally up or down-regulate confidence estimates, with no influence on the calibration between confidence and first-order performance as reported recently (Filevich, Koß, & Faivre, 2019).…”

Disentangling the origins of confidence in speeded perceptual judgments through multimodal imaging

“…The notion that committing to (but not observing) first-order decisions sharpens confidence estimates is corroborated by studies showing that metacognitive performance increases when RT are taken into account to compute confidence (30), and decreases in case motor actions are irrelevant to the task at play (31), or when the task-relevant motor action is disrupted by transcranial magnetic stimulation over premotor cortex (12). The role of motor signals for metacognition is also supported by recent results indicating that confidence is modulated in presence of motor activity related to first-order responses (14,15,32,33). Further, alpha desynchronization over the sensorimotor cortex controlling the hand performing that action was found to correlate with confidence (13).…”

Task-related motor response inflates confidence

“…Previous studies supporting this thesis have shown that one's own motor response that precedes confidence judgment increases correlations between confidence and response accuracy (Pereira et al, 2018;Siedlecka et al, 2016;Siedlecka et al, 2019b;Wierzchoń et al, 2014;Wokke et al, 2019). However, in a recent study, Filevich and colleagues (Filevich et al, 2019) found that when participants were asked to continuously track decision-related characteristics of stimuli (the motion direction of the stimulus) by pressing the left and right keys, their confidence in a temporalsummation decision task was higher than in the no-tracking condition. They interpreted the results as showing that action related to a stimulus that one has to decide about provides additional sources of information, thus leading to more liberal confidence criteria.…”