Behavioural, modeling, and electrophysiological evidence for domain-generality in human metacognition

Nathan Faivre (1, 2) , Elisa Filevich (3) , Guillermo Solovey (4) , Simone Kühn (5) , Olaf Blanke (1)

1 LNCO - Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience
2 CES - Centre d'économie de la Sorbonne
3 HU Berlin - Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin = Humboldt University of Berlin = Université Humboldt de Berlin
4 FCEyN - Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales [Buenos Aires]
5 Max Planck Institute for Human Development

Metacognition, or the capacity to introspect on one's own mental states, has been mostly characterized through confidence reports in visual tasks. A pressing question is to what extent the results from visual studies generalize to other domains. Answering this question allows determining whether metacognition operates through shared, domain-general mechanisms, or through idiosyncratic, domain-specific mechanisms. Here, we report three new lines of evidence for decisional and post-decisional mechanisms arguing for the domain-generality of metacognition. First, metacognitive efficiency correlated between auditory, tactile, visual, and audiovisual tasks. Second, confidence in an audiovisual task was best modeled using supramodal formats based on integrated representations of auditory and visual signals. Third, confidence in correct responses involved similar electrophysiological markers for visual and audiovisual tasks that are associated with motor preparation preceding the perceptual judgment. We conclude that the domain-generality of metacognition relies on supramodal confidence estimates and decisional signals that are shared across sensory modalities.

Mots clés: metacognition; confidence; supramodality; audiovisual; EEG; signal detection theory

Domaines: Sciences cognitives

Nathan Faivre, Elisa Filevich, Guillermo Solovey, Simone Kühn, Olaf Blanke. Behavioural, modeling, and electrophysiological evidence for domain-generality in human metacognition. 2016. ⟨hal-01421370⟩