Metacognition in human decision-making: confidence and error monitoring

Abstract

People are capable of robust evaluations of their decisions: they are often aware of their mistakes even without explicit feedback, and report levels of confidence in their decisions that correlate with objective performance. These metacognitive abilities help people to avoid making the same mistakes twice, and to avoid overcommitting time or resources to decisions that are based on unreliable evidence. In this review, we consider progress in characterizing the neural and mechanistic basis of these related aspects of metacognition—confidence judgements and error monitoring—and identify crucial points of convergence between methods and theories in the two fields. This convergence suggests that common principles govern metacognitive judgements of confidence and accuracy; in particular, a shared reliance on post-decisional processing within the systems responsible for the initial decision. However, research in both fields has focused rather narrowly on simple, discrete decisions—reflecting the correspondingly restricted focus of current models of the decision process itself—raising doubts about the degree to which discovered principles will scale up to explain metacognitive evaluation of real-world decisions and actions that are fluid, temporally extended, and embedded in the broader context of evolving behavioural goals.

Shared Neural Markers of Decision Confidence and Error Detection

“…Crucially, this association did not reflect changing proportions of trials classified as errors across confidence ratings, but rather reflected truly graded changes in correct-trial confidence: Pe amplitude was predictive of subtle shifts in confidence (e.g., from "certainly" to "maybe") on trials that were objectively correct and accurately judged so by participants. The observed association of Pe amplitude with both error detection and decision confidence indicates that these two metacognitive evaluations reflect similar underlying mechanisms (Yeung and Summerfield, 2012). In prior work on error detection, binary error judgments have been studied, often with concurrent EEG recording; in the memory and perceptual decision-making literatures, the focus has typically been on graded judgments of correctness or certainty.…”

“…First, linking decision confidence to well characterized EEG correlates of error processing should place useful constraints on emerging theories of the neural basis of metacognitive monitoring (Fleming and Frith, 2014). Moreover, associations between confidence and errors present a significant challenge to many current models of decision confidence, which propose that confidence judgments are formed at the time of the primary decision-yet error judgments are known to depend on continued processing of stimulus and response information after the initial decision (Yeung and Summerfield, 2012).…”

“…or "did you make an error?"). Despite this similarity in approach, there is little compatibility between current theories of confidence and error detection (Yeung and Summerfield, 2012). For example, popular models of confidence, such as the balanceof-evidence hypothesis (Vickers and Packer, 1982), explain graded confidence judgments but not why participants sometimes state with certainty that an earlier response was incorrect.…”

Disentangling signal and noise in autism spectrum disorder

“…Specifically, one would expect higher precision of the posterior estimate for ASD in case of higher precision prediction errors. At first sight, this seems to be a testable prediction, for example by directly or indirectly probing for decision confidence (Meyniel, Schlunegger, & Dehaene, 2015;Yeung & Summerfield, 2012). Additionally, one should expect less trial-by-trial fluctuations in confidence according to the current proposal.…”

A 76-Year-Old Woman with Diaphoresis and Anxiety

“…As metacognitive abilities vary among individuals, 17 monitoring of errors also varies. 18 Metacognition is a powerful tool to both improve a clinician's clinical reasoning and to teach clinical reasoning to trainees. A review of strategies to promote metacognition in science education is available elsewhere.…”