Sources of Metacognitive Inefficiency

Metacognitive Computations for Information Search: Confidence in Control

“…This, in turn, prevents it from exhibiting error monitoring. Furthermore, and inconsistent with empirical observations of dissociations between performance and metacognition (Rahnev et al, 2020;Shekhar & Rahnev, 2020), it ensures the actor and the rater's accuracy remain coupled, as we will discuss in more detail below. 1 1 Our postdecisional model somewhat extends Fleming and Daw (2017) but is using a formally equivalent architecture.…”

“…However, it is of course also limiting. Decision noise is ubiquitous in behaviour (Mueller & Weidemann, 2008;Wilson et al, 2014), and noisy computations offer a different lens for understanding metacognitive inefficiencies (Shekhar & Rahnev, 2020) and exploration (Findling, Skvortsova, Dromnelle, Palminteri, & Wyart, 2019). In our task, consider an agent which would have the opportunity to collect very accurate information, but has difficulty translating this information to good actions (for example through a low softmax-temperature or high trembling hand parameter).…”

“…However, humans also enjoy a more sophisticated and explicit sense of their expected accuracy, in forms of metacognition (Fleming & Daw, 2017;Shekhar & Rahnev, 2020;Yeung & Summerfield, 2012). Explicit metacognition refers to conscious representations of performance that are available for flexible usage in behavioural control or communication to others (Shea et al, 2014).…”

“…These models have been highly successful in explaining the latent speedaccuracy trade-off present in many perceptual tasks (Bogacz, Wagenmakers, Forstmann, & Nieuwenhuis, 2010;Ratcliff, Smith, Brown, & McKoon, 2016). However, humans also enjoy a more sophisticated and explicit sense of their expected accuracy, in forms of metacognition (Fleming & Daw, 2017;Shekhar & Rahnev, 2020;Yeung & Summerfield, 2012). Explicit metacognition refers to conscious representations of performance that are available for flexible usage in behavioural control or communication to others (Shea et al, 2014).…”

“…Metacognitive evaluations accompany a wide range of decisions, from basic judgments of perception and memory to reflective evaluations of our knowledge or the "goodness" of subjective choices (De Martino, Fleming, Garrett, & Dolan, 2013;Fischer, Amelung, & Said, 2019;Nelson & Narens, 1990;Rahnev et al, 2020). In turn, recent research has begun to reveal constraints on how metacognitive judgments are formed -both in terms of within-subject decision processes and between-subject factors (Fleming & Daw, 2017;Shekhar & Rahnev, 2020;Yeung & Summerfield, 2012). For example, in perceptual decision-making, human confidence judgments are influenced both by the uncertainty of sensory information, and the difficulty of making a particular discrete choice (Bang & Fleming, 2018;Pouget et al, 2016).…”