Temporal Metacognition as the Decoding of Self-Generated Brain Dynamics

Abstract

Metacognition, the ability to know about one’s thought process, is self-referential. Here, we combined psychophysics and time-resolved neuroimaging to explore metacognitive inference on the accuracy of a self-generated behavior. Human participants generated a time interval and evaluated the signed magnitude of their temporal production. We show that both self-generation and self-evaluation relied on the power of beta oscillations (β; 15–40 Hz) with increases in early β power predictive of increases in duration. We characterized the dynamics of β power in a low-dimensional space (β state-space trajectories) as a function of timing and found that the more distinct trajectories, the more accurate metacognitive inferences were. These results suggest that β states instantiate an internal variable determining the fate of the timing network’s trajectory, possibly as release from inhibition. Altogether, our study describes oscillatory mechanisms for timing, suggesting that temporal metacognition relies on inferential processes of self-generated dynamics.

The Strength of Alpha–Beta Oscillatory Coupling Predicts Motor Timing Precision

“…Although changes in feedback were manipulated in the experimental design, there was no ad hoc hypothesis regarding its effects on possible PAC, notably because no significant changes in precision were found as a function of feedback (repeated-measures ANOVA; F (5,65) Ͻ 1, p Ͼ 0.1). Additionally, as can be seen in Figure 1D, a general trend for a lengthening in duration estimation was observed over the entire course of the recording (repeated-measures ANOVA; F (5,65) ϭ 2.71, p ϭ 0.028); this drift was shown to be independent from changes in feedback or duration (Kononowicz et al, 2018). In the next section, we explore the role of oscillatory coupling in timing.…”

“…Feedback was presented in all trials in Block 4 and in 15% of trials in Block 5 and 6, This experimental manipulation was outside the scope of the question in this study, and was addressed in another analysis assessing the possibility of implicit temporal recalibration (cf. Kononowicz et al, 2018). On average, the new target duration was 1.56 s based on the average threshold.…”

“…Between all experimental blocks, participants were reminded to produce the 1.45 s target duration as accurately as possible, and to maximize the number of correct trials in each block. Note that the manipulation of feedback was investigated in a different set of analyses pertaining to temporal metacognition during motor timing (Kononowicz et al, 2018) and does not constitute our condition of interest in this study.…”

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

“…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.…”

“…Additionally, humans can reliably 20 report their temporal errors following time reproduction (i.e., motor reproduction of a sensory time 21 interval; Akdogan & Balci, 2017) and production (i.e., self-generation of a time interval in the absence 22 of sensory template, Fig. 1a; Kononowicz et al, 2017). In the latter, the precision of self-generated 23 time intervals (first-order judgment, FOJ) informed participants' self-evaluation (second-order 24 judgment, SOJ) yielding accurate estimates of the signed magnitude of temporal errors.…”