Neural evidence accumulation persists after choice to inform metacognitive judgments
- Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
Abstract
The ability to revise one's certainty or confidence in a preceding choice is a critical feature of adaptive decision-making but the neural mechanisms underpinning this metacognitive process have yet to be characterized. In the present study, we demonstrate that the same build-to-threshold decision variable signal that triggers an initial choice continues to evolve after commitment, and determines the timing and accuracy of self-initiated error detection reports by selectively representing accumulated evidence that the preceding choice was incorrect. We also show that a peri-choice signal generated in medial frontal cortex provides a source of input to this post-decision accumulation process, indicating that metacognitive judgments are not solely based on the accumulation of feedforward sensory evidence. These findings impart novel insights into the generative mechanisms of metacognition.
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Author details
Ethics
Human subjects: We state in our manuscript (p.19):"[Subjects] provided written informed consent, and all procedures were approved by the Trinity College Dublin ethics committee and conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki.
Reviewing Editor
- Michael J Frank, Brown University, United States
Publication history
- Received: September 29, 2015
- Accepted: December 17, 2015
- Accepted Manuscript published: December 19, 2015 (version 1)
- Version of Record published: January 28, 2016 (version 2)
Copyright
© 2015, Murphy et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Neural evidence accumulation persists after choice to inform metacognitive judgments
eLife 4:e11946.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.11946
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