Sackur, J. | bioRxiv Science

bioRxiv2019

Does nonlinear neural network dynamics explain human confidence in a sequence of perceptual decisions ?

Electrophysiological recordings during perceptual decision tasks in monkeys suggest that the degree of confidence in a decision is based on a simple neural signal produced by the neural decision process. Attractor neural networks provide an appropriate biophysical modeling framework, and account for the experimental results very well. However, it remains unclear whether attractor neural networks can account for confidence reports in humans. We present the results from an experiment in which participants are asked to perform an orientation discrimination task, followed by a confidence judgment. Here we show that an attractor neural network model quantitatively reproduces, for each participant, the relations between accuracy, response times and confidence. We show that the attractor neural network also accounts for confidence-specific sequential effects observed in the experiment (participants are faster on trials following high confidence trials). Remarkably, this is obtained as an inevitable outcome of the network dynamics, without any feedback specific to the previous decision (that would result in, e.g., a change in the model parameters before the onset of the next trial). Our results thus suggest that a metacognitive process such as confidence in ones decision is linked to the intrinsically nonlinear dynamics of the decision-making neural network.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2019

Comparing self- and hetero-metacognition in the absence of verbal communication

The ability to infer how confident other people are in their decisions is crucial for regulating social interactions. It is unclear whether one can read others confidence in absence of verbal communication and whether one can infer it as accurately as for ones own confidence. To address these questions, we used an auditory task in which participants had to guess the confidence of someone else performing the task or to judge their own confidence in different conditions (i.e., while performing the task themselves or while watching themselves performing the task on a pre-recorded video). Results show that participants are able to guess the confidence of other people as accurately as when judging their own. Crucially, we show that hetero-metacognition is a flexible mechanism relying on different cues according to the context. Our results support the idea that metacognition leverages the same inference mechanisms as involved in theory of mind.

neuroscience↗