The neural basis of metacognitive ability

“inaccurate [2, 3].”

“By focussing on self-reports about memory performance—metacognitive reports—Flavell provided a systematic framework for the study of self-knowledge in healthy individuals [13].”

“Despite being dissociable, it turns out that metacognitive accuracy generally scales with task performance [33, 77–80].”

“other low-level, based on non-verbal epistemic feelings of uncertainty [125, 126].”

“Indeed, several recent models of local and large-scale brain function rely on hierarchy as a principal organising factor [9, 10].”

“As noted above, this capacity to detect the “background” or lived subjective context of one’s object-focused experience contrasts with an “inward turn” of attention, often characterized as “introspection,” or retrospective second-order judgment (Fleming & Dolan, 2012; Overgaard & Sandberg, 2012).”

“…framework, these findings may be consistent with prefrontal involvement in representing a confidence variable and/or hyperparameters about sources of decision uncertainty (Lau, 2008), and/or in representing the output of a confidence computation for subsequent report (Fleming & Dolan, 2012).”

“The anterior and dorsolateral PFC, by contrast, seem aligned to retrospective monitoring judgments, that is, to confidence judgments (Fleming & Dolan, 2012).”

“For other domains of cognition, such as exteroception or memory, the anterior prefrontal cortex (roughly corresponding to Brodmann’s area 10) has been identified as a key area for metacognition by several neuroimaging and lesion studies (for review, see Fleming and Dolan, 2012).”

“…implicit system of conflict and error monitoring supported by the posterior medial prefrontal cortex (PFC) (e.g. Ridderinkhof, van den Wildenberg, Segalowitz, & Carter, 2004), rather than the explicit monitoring and control associated with metacognition (see Fleming and Dolan (2012) for a review).”

“agency in healthy participants [66] and in addicts [26 ].”

“Neuropsychological cases reveal dissociations between these levels (for review, see Fleming and Dolan, 2012), raising the question as to the neural mechanisms underlying metacognition in healthy individuals.”

“Our view could therefore seem closer to ''hierarchical models'' (Fleming and Dolan, 2012; Fleming et al., 2012; Timmermans et al., 2012).”

“Metacog- nitive evaluations of perceptual discriminations may be best conceived of as an online monitor that integrates information over short time scales (Fleming and Dolan, 2012).”

“Often, researchers restrict the definition of metacognition to the kind of second-order behaviour available for subjective report [6].”

“In addition, most studies of meta-memory have focused on prospective judgements of suc- cess which may draw on neural substrates distinct to those sup- porting retrospective confidence judgements (Fleming and Dolan, 2012).”

“The aPFC is often associated with metacognition (Christoff et al., 2003; Ramnani and Owen, 2004; Fleming and Dolan, 2012; Fleming et al., 2012), and there is indirect evidence that the metacognitive mechanisms in the aPFC may be general for different visual tasks (Song et al., 2011).”

“Confidence generally correlates with task performance, and the strength of this correlation—measuring the accuracy of one's knowledge of the quality of one's decisions—is itself typically correlated with, although sometimes dissociable from, performance (Fleming & Dolan 2012).”

“DOI: 10.7554/eLife.12192.001”

“…tasks (Baird et al., 2013, McCurdy et al., 2013, Fleming et al., 2014, Ye et al., 2018), and that connectivity between prefrontal cortex and other brain areas is important for metacognitive capacity (Baird et al., 2013, 2015, De Martino et al., 2013, Fleming et al., 2012, Zheng et al., 2021).”

“in the DLPFC during the performance of perceptual decision-making tasks requiring cognitive control (Fleming et al., 2010; Fleming and Dolan, 2012).”

“control on decision-making, memory as well as on the sense of agency in healthy participants (115) and in addicts (17).”

“It is in fact an open issue whether the primary response and the confidence in this response arise in parallel or serially, and from a single brain circuit or not [11,40].”

“Finally, VM meditators show significantly thicker cortex [18] (and in Tibetan Buddhist practitioners, increased grey matter density [22]) in RLPFC/BA10, suggesting enhancement of a region strongly implicated in introspection [5,7,8,45].”

“…lower-level visceral-motor brainstem nuclei and higher-order regions implicated in decision-making, metacognition, and self-awareness, such as the ventromedial and dorsomedial prefrontal cortices (Allen et al., 2017, 2016a; Fleming and Dolan, 2012; Menon and Uddin, 2010; Ullsperger et al., 2010).”

“…et al., 2013; Cortese, Amano, Koizumi, Kawato, & Lau, 2016; De Martino, Fleming, Garrett, & Dolan, 2013; Fleck, Daselaar, Dobbins, & Cabeza, 2006; Fleming et al., 2012; Hil-genstock, Weiss, & Witte, 2014; Yokoyama et al., 2010) neuroimaging data indicate that a frontoparietal network contributes…”

“…monitoring across a range of tasks (Fleming et al., 2010; McCurdy et al., 2013; Baird et al., 2013; Allen et al., 2016; Cortese et al., 2017; see Fleming & Dolan, 2012, for a review), suggesting the potential for targeted modulation of metacognition independently of changes in first-order…”

“However, this region has also been implicated in generating metacognitive awareness of our own mental states (Baird, Smallwood, Gorgolewski, & Margulies, 2013; Fleming & Dolan, 2012; Fleming, Huijgen, & Dolan, 2012; Fleming, Weil, Nagy, Dolan, & Rees, 2010; McCurdy et al., 2013).”

“The medial prefrontal cortex, a focal area for metacognition [100], is more strongly activated during self-assessment tasks in westerners than in people from less-individualistic cultures [101,102], and self-referential thoughts differentially activate hubs of the resting-state network in relation to individualistic v…”

“Previous research has established that metacognitive efficiency in different domains can be isolated and studied independently of primary cognitive capacity (see Fleming & Dolan, 2012, for a review).”

“For commercial re-use, please contact journals.permissions@oup.com Key words: heartbeat-evoked potential, interoception, learning, metacognitive awareness, phase synchrony”

“One useful avenue to integrating consciousness theories with SDT will be to identify the extent to which separable brain networks subserve type I and type II discriminations (Fleming, Weil, Nagy, Dolan, & Rees, 2010; Fleming & Dolan, 2012).”

“This ability relies on specific neural circuitry in the prefrontal cortex [12] that promotes reflection on one’s performance and, even in the absence of explicit feedback, a realization that mistakes have been made [13, 14].”

“Combining measurements of subjective experience and neural activity has also driven advances in research on meta-cognition (Fleming and Dolan, 2012), placebo effects (Vase et al.”

“Indeed, assessing the confidence in one′s own perceptual decisions requires the integration of both perceptual and non-perceptual factors (Fleming & Dolan, 2012).”

“Metacognitive ability in the perceptual domain is linked to activation and connectivity of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC; Baird et al., 2013; Fleming & Dolan, 2012; Fleming et al., 2012), and the ACC is active during meditation practice (Hölzel et al., 2007); in addition, meditation experience…”

“In this context, metacognition is often described as either prospective or retrospective (Fleming and Dolan, 2012).”

“At the same time, advances in analysis methods like signal detection theory (Green and Swets, 1966) are enabling researchers to draw more rigorous distinctions between objective and subjective aspects of perception, as well as to quantify individual differences in metacognition (cognition about cognition) that may be…”

“These observations indicate that there should exist a 55 separate neural system (meta-level) to monitor the decision process (object-level) (Flavell, 1979; 56 Nelson and Narens, 1990; Dunlosky and Metcalfe, 2009; Fleming and Dolan, 2012).”

“Metacognition, an individual’s insight into their own cognitive functioning, 20 may be of relevance as a therapeutic target because, by definition, SCD involves an individual’s underestimation of their cognitive ability relative to objective testing.”

“Indeed, the neural computations underlying this second metacognitive process are well documented in adults [1, 18].”

“Previous studies have found that metacognitive accuracy can be distinguished from task performance and varies widely across individuals (for a review see Fleming and Dolan, 2012).”

“Both conflict signals arise independent of external feedback, thus qualifying as correlates 561 of metacognitive self-monitoring (63, 64).”

“Previous studies in human and non-human animals have identified representations of confidence that fulfill a subset of these criteria (Fleming and Dolan, 2014; Hanks and Summerfield, 2017; Ott et al., 2019; Shadlen and Kiani, 2013).”

“Metacognitive Judgments Are Less Accurate Given Prospectively than Retrospectively Marta Siedlecka 1, Borysław Paulewicz 2 and Michał Wierzchoń 1* 1Consciousness Lab, Institute of Psychology, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland, 2University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Katowice, Poland Prospective and retro…”

“Metacognition involves the lateral prefrontal cortex and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (141,142), suggesting that these areas may be relevant for anxious-depression and compulsivity (36).”

“…scale positively with decision accuracy and negatively with response time (Vickers and Packer, 1982; Baranski and Petrusic, 1998) (though this relationship is not perfect, and is subject to individual differences, e.g., (Baranski and Petrusic, 1994; Fleming et al., 2010; Fleming and Dolan, 2012).”

“Metacognitive capacity – the extent to which judgments track performance – is dissociable from first-order task performance and associated with distinct neural substrates (see Fleming and Dolan 2012; Pannu and Kaszniak 2005, for reviews).”

“This is perhaps surprising given that similar frontal structures are associated with cognitive control, WM, and metacognitive awareness (Naghavi and Nyberg, 2005; Cul et al., 2009; Persaud et al., 2011; Bor and Seth, 2012; Fleming and Dolan, 2012; Miller and Buschman, 2013; Ester et al., 2015).”

“Incidentally, when perceptual capacity (d') is controlled for, both subjective confidence and awareness seem to depend on prefrontal activity (Fleming & Dolan, 2012; Lau & Passingham, 2006).”

“People vary in their ability to construct these metacognitive estimates [4].”

“, appearance of some pattern in the dots) or working memory of the experience of deliberating [53], what is sometimes referred to as metacognition [54].”

“The anterior insula and cingulate are engaged in performance and error monitoring processes, and provide inputs for the monitoring and control of cognitive processing by frontal and parietal regions (13, 29).”

“Metacognition requires an accurate mapping between the accumulation of evidence determining perceptual accuracy and subjective confidence (Fetsch et al., 2015; Fleming and Dolan, 2012; Kiani and Shadlen, 2009), which is typically reported retrospectively (and thus depends on accurate and efficient memory).”

“Finally, metacognitive accuracy—defined as the correlation coefficient between the absolute estimation error and confidence rating (Fleming & Dolan, 2012) —produced by the fitted model is 0.453 0.018, which closely matches the empirical value of 0.464 0.020.”

“Based on literature evidences, we can hypothesize that anosognosia in DM1 patients is related to brain dysfunction [42].”

“Just like in this example, most decisions in everyday life are accompanied by a subjective feeling of confidence emerging from the constant monitoring of our own thoughts and actions by metacognitive processes (Fleming and Dolan, 2012; Yeung and Summerfield, 2012).”

“Indeed, anterior and medial regions of prefrontal cortex, damaged in our vmPFC patients, have previously been implicated in meta-awareness of one’s own mental contents (Gilbert et al., 2006; Fleming and Dolan, 2012).”

“It results from a meta-cognitive operation [19], which according to recent studies could be performed automatically even when confidence judgments are not explicitly required [20].”

“However, the meditation experience heightens introspection (Fleming et al., 2012), because of the highly introspective nature of such practices: more objective assessment of a meditator’s own internal states and mental contents (Kabat-Zinn, 1994; Goenka, 2000; Lutz et al.”

“014], underscoring that in the active condition, RT for correct responses correlated negatively with confidence, and response times for errors correlated positively with confidence [F(1,26) = 23.”