Sensory noise increases metacognitive efficiency.

Abstract

Visual metacognition is the ability to employ confidence ratings in order to predict the accuracy of one's decisions about visual stimuli. Despite years of research, it is still unclear how visual metacognitive efficiency can be manipulated. Here we show that a hierarchical model of confidence generation makes a counterintuitive prediction: Higher sensory noise should increase metacognitive efficiency. The reason is that sensory noise has a large negative influence on the decision (where it is the only corrupting influence) but a smaller negative influence on confidence (where it is one of two corrupting influences; the other one being metacognitive noise). To test this prediction, we used a perceptual learning paradigm to decrease the amount of sensory noise. In Experiment 1, seven days of training led to significant decrease in noise as well as a corresponding decrease in metacognitive efficiency. Experiment 2 showed the same effect in a brief 97---trial learning for each of two different tasks. Finally, in Experiment 3, we experimentally manipulated stimulus contrast to increase sensory noise and observed a corresponding increase in metacognitive efficiency. Our findings demonstrate the existence of a robust positive relationship between sensory noise and metacognitive efficiency. These results could not be captured by a standard model in which decision and confidence judgments are made based on the same underlying information. Thus, our study provides a novel way to directly manipulate metacognitive efficiency and suggests the existence of metacognitive noise that corrupts confidence but not the perceptual decision.

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

“…The hierarchical model proposes that metacognition and primary decision-making are two distinct cognitive processes: the primary decision-making is implemented at a first order, while a metacognitive process access both sensory evidence for the decision-making and other sources of information to form a judgement (Fleming & Daw, 2017). Many studies have reported such dissociation between metacognition and decision-making, with the PFC playing a central role in the hierarchical monitoring (Allen et al, 2017;Bang et al, 2019;Fleming et al, 2014;Hauser et al, 2017b;Qiu et al, 2018;Rounis et al, 2010;Shekhar and Rahnev, 2018).…”

Distinguishing the roles of dorsolateral and anterior PFC in visual metacognition

“…We sought to build a generative model that preserves the assumptions of SDT (Green and Swets, 1966) at the level of the perceptual decisions but also allows us to explicitly model the transformations to the sensory signal that are responsible for generating the confidence ratings. The simplest way to model the transformation of the sensory signal at the metacognitive level is to postulate the existence of metacognitive noise that corrupts the sensory signal as done previously by the creators of the meta-d′ measure (Maniscalco and Lau, 2014), us (Rahnev et al, 2016; Bang et al, 2017) and others (Mueller and Weideman, 2008; Jang et al, 2012; De Martino et al, 2013; van den Berg et al, 2017).…”

Overlapping and unique neural circuits are activated during perceptual decision making and confidence

“…At the same time, many other experiments imply the presence of dissociable neural circuits for perceptual decision making and confidence. Behaviorally, confidence judgments can be dissociated from the accuracy of the perceptual decision in both humans (Lau and Passingham, 2006;Rahnev et al, 2011bRahnev et al, , 2015Zylberberg et al, 2012Zylberberg et al, , 2016Vlassova et al, 2014;Spence et al, 2015;Koizumi et al, 2015;Song et al, 2015;Samaha et al, 2016Samaha et al, , 2017Boldt et al, 2017;Peters et al, 2017;Desender et al, 2018) and monkeys (Ferrigno et al, 2017), whereas other studies suggest that confidence judgments but not perceptual decisions are subject to late metacognitive noise (Mueller and Weidemann, 2008;Jang et al, 2012;De Martino et al, 2013;Maniscalco and Lau, 2016;Rahnev et al, 2016;van den Berg et al, 2017;Shekhar and Rahnev, 2018;Bang et al, 2019). Neurally, studies employing transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) delivered to the prefrontal cortex have been able to alter subjects' confidence ratings, while leaving their perceptual decisions unaffected (Rounis et al, 2010;Fleming et al, 2015;Rahnev et al, 2016;Shekhar and Rahnev, 2018).…”