Action monitoring boosts perceptual confidence

Abstract

Dominant models of metacognition argue that the quality of sensory information determines perceptual confidence. However, recent accounts suggest that also motor signals contribute to confidence judgments. In line with this assumption, we conducted three pre-registered experiments to investigate the role of the motor preparation of perceptual decisions on confidence. Participants reported the orientation of a Gabor and indicated the level of confidence in their response. A visual cue, displayed before the Gabor, induced the planning of an action that could be congruent/incongruent with the response side and compatible/incompatible with the effector subsequently used to report the Gabor's orientation. In the three experiments, we observed that confidence consistently increased when participants prepared spatially incongruent actions compared to congruent actions, irrespectively of the effector primed and independently of the correctness of their responses. In the third experiment, electroencephalography recordings (EEG) showed increased P2 amplitude for incongruent compared to congruent actions, suggesting that the planning of incongruent actions led to a larger involvement of early attentional resources required for response inhibition which in turn impacted post-decisional markers of confidence (Error Positivity). Taken together, these findings suggest that motor information might trigger action monitoring mechanisms susceptible to alter confidence in our decisions, implying that motor processes are not only the output, but also an input of the decision process.

A functional overlap between evidence accumulation, confidence, and changes of mind in the pre-supplementary motor area and insula

“…Importantly, we accounted for motor contributions to our results by re-running population analyses for evidence accumulation and confidence while including instantaneous mouse velocity as a covariate of no-interest, with no impact on our main results (see SI). We also note that motor aspects should not be treated only as a nuisance, as some are considered key factors of decision-making and metacognitive monitoring (Burk et al, 2014; Faivre et al, 2020; Filevich et al, 2020; Fleming et al, 2015; Pereira et al, 2020; Sanchez et al, 2023). Due to this, we are confident that evidence accumulation drives changes of mind in the current task as was shown in several similar tasks (Kiani et al, 2014; Resulaj et al, 2009; van den Berg et al, 2016).…”