Biology subjects

Filevich, E.

Publications and source records attributed to Filevich, E..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2018

I know that I don’t know: Structural and functional connectivity underlying meta-ignorance in pre-schoolers

Research Highlights[1] Children develop the ability to report that they do not know something at around five years of age.\n\n[2] Children who could correctly report their own ignorance in a partial-knowledge task showed thicker cortices within medial orbitofrontal cortex.\n\n[3] This region was functionally connected to parts of the default-mode network.\n\n[4] The default-mode network might support the development of correct metacognitive monitoring.\n\nAbstractMetacognition plays a pivotal role in human development. The ability to realize that we do not know something, or meta-ignorance, emerges after approximately five years of age. We aimed at identifying the brain systems that underlie the developmental emergence of this ability in a preschool sample.\n\nTwenty-four children aged between five and six years answered questions under three conditions of a meta-ignorance task twice. In the critical partial knowledge condition, an experimenter first showed two toys to a child, then announced that she would place one of them in a box behind a screen, out of sight from the child. The experimenter then asked the child whether or not she knew which toy was in the box.\n\nChildren who answered correctly both times to the metacognitive question in the partial knowledge condition (n=9) showed greater cortical thickness in a cluster within left medial orbitofrontal cortex than children who did not (n=15). Further, seed-based functional connectivity analyses of the brain during resting state revealed that this region is functionally connected to the medial orbitofrontal gyrus, posterior cingulate gyrus and precuneus, and mid- and inferior temporal gyri.\n\nThis finding suggests that the default mode network, critically through its prefrontal regions, supports introspective processing. It leads to the emergence of metacognitive monitoring allowing children to explicitly report their own ignorance.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2016

Behavioural, modeling, and electrophysiological evidence for domain-generality in human metacognition

Metacognition, or the capacity to introspect on ones own mental states, has been mostly characterized through confidence reports in visual tasks. A pressing question is to what extent the results from visual studies generalize to other domains. Answering this question allows determining whether metacognition operates through shared, domain-general mechanisms, or through idiosyncratic, domain-specific mechanisms. Here, we report three new lines of evidence for decisional and post-decisional mechanisms arguing for the domain-generality of metacognition. First, metacognitive efficiency correlated between auditory, tactile, visual, and audiovisual tasks. Second, confidence in an audiovisual task was best modeled using supramodal formats based on integrated representations of auditory and visual signals. Third, confidence in correct responses involved similar electrophysiological markers for visual and audiovisual tasks that are associated with motor preparation preceding the perceptual judgment. We conclude that the domain-generality of metacognition relies on supramodal confidence estimates and decisional signals that are shared across sensory modalities.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2016

Resting-state fMRI correlations: from link-wiseunreliability to whole brain stability

The functional architecture of spontaneous BOLD fluctuations has been characterized in detail by numerous studies, demonstrating its potential relevance as a biomarker. However, the systematic investigation of its consistency is still in its infancy. Here, we analyze both the within- and between-subject variability as well as the test-retest reliability of resting-state functional connectivity (FC) estimates in a unique data set comprising multiple fMRI scans (42) from 5 subjects, and 50 single scans from 50 subjects. To this aim we adopted a statistical framework enabling us to disentangle the contribution of different sources of variability and their dependence on scan duration, and showed that the low reliability of single links can be largely improved using multiple scans per subject. Moreover, we show that practically all observed inter-region variability (at the link-level) is not significant and due to the statistical uncertainty of the estimator itself rather than to genuine variability among areas. Finally, we use the proposed statistical framework to demonstrate that, despite the poor consistency of single links, the information carried by the whole-brain spontaneous correlation structure is indeed robust, and can in fact be used as a functional fingerprint.

neuroscience↗