Neural evidence accumulation persists after choice to inform metacognitive judgments

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.

Article and author information

Author details

  1. Peter R Murphy

    Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience, School of Psychology, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
    For correspondence
    murphyp7@tcd.ie
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  2. Ian H Robertson

    Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience, School of Psychology, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  3. Siobhán Harty

    Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience, School of Psychology, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.
  4. Redmond G O'Connell

    Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience, School of Psychology, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
    Competing interests
    The authors declare that no competing interests exist.

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.

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.

Metrics

  • 3,585
    views
  • 842
    downloads
  • 123
    citations

Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.

Download links

A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.

Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)

Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)

Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)

  1. Peter R Murphy
  2. Ian H Robertson
  3. Siobhán Harty
  4. Redmond G O'Connell
(2015)
Neural evidence accumulation persists after choice to inform metacognitive judgments
eLife 4:e11946.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.11946

Share this article

https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.11946

Further reading

    1. Neuroscience
    Ikhwan Bin Khalid, Eric T Reifenstein ... Richard Kempter
    Research Article

    When subjects navigate through spatial environments, grid cells exhibit firing fields that are arranged in a triangular grid pattern. Direct recordings of grid cells from the human brain are rare. Hence, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies proposed an indirect measure of entorhinal grid-cell activity, quantified as hexadirectional modulation of fMRI activity as a function of the subject’s movement direction. However, it remains unclear how the activity of a population of grid cells may exhibit hexadirectional modulation. Here, we use numerical simulations and analytical calculations to suggest that this hexadirectional modulation is best explained by head-direction tuning aligned to the grid axes, whereas it is not clearly supported by a bias of grid cells toward a particular phase offset. Firing-rate adaptation can result in hexadirectional modulation, but the available cellular data is insufficient to clearly support or refute this option. The magnitude of hexadirectional modulation furthermore depends considerably on the subject’s navigation pattern, indicating that future fMRI studies could be designed to test which hypothesis most likely accounts for the fMRI measure of grid cells. Our findings also underline the importance of quantifying the properties of human grid cells to further elucidate how hexadirectional modulations of fMRI activity may emerge.

    1. Developmental Biology
    2. Neuroscience
    Changtian Ye, Ryan Ho ... James Q Zheng
    Research Article

    Environmental insults, including mild head trauma, significantly increase the risk of neurodegeneration. However, it remains challenging to establish a causative connection between early-life exposure to mild head trauma and late-life emergence of neurodegenerative deficits, nor do we know how sex and age compound the outcome. Using a Drosophila model, we demonstrate that exposure to mild head trauma causes neurodegenerative conditions that emerge late in life and disproportionately affect females. Increasing age-at-injury further exacerbates this effect in a sexually dimorphic manner. We further identify sex peptide signaling as a key factor in female susceptibility to post-injury brain deficits. RNA sequencing highlights a reduction in innate immune defense transcripts specifically in mated females during late life. Our findings establish a causal relationship between early head trauma and late-life neurodegeneration, emphasizing sex differences in injury response and the impact of age-at-injury. Finally, our findings reveal that reproductive signaling adversely impacts female response to mild head insults and elevates vulnerability to late-life neurodegeneration.