Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences
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Philos. Trans. R. Soc. Lond., B, Biol. Sci. · May 2012
ReviewWhat failure in collective decision-making tells us about metacognition.
Condorcet (1785) proposed that a majority vote drawn from individual, independent and fallible (but not totally uninformed) opinions provides near-perfect accuracy if the number of voters is adequately large. Research in social psychology has since then repeatedly demonstrated that collectives can and do fail more often than expected by Condorcet. Since human collective decisions often follow from exchange of opinions, these failures provide an exquisite opportunity to understand human communication of metacognitive confidence. ⋯ Inverting the question, we ask: under what conditions can two brains integrate information about one sensory modality optimally? We review recent work that has taken this approach and report discoveries about the quantitative limits of collective perceptual decision-making, and the role of the mode of communication and feedback in collective decision-making. We propose that shared metacognitive confidence conveys the strength of an individual's opinion and its reliability inseparably. We further suggest that a functional role of shared metacognition is to provide substitute signals in situations where outcome is necessary for learning but unavailable or impossible to establish.
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Philos. Trans. R. Soc. Lond., B, Biol. Sci. · May 2012
ReviewA computational framework for the study of confidence in humans and animals.
Confidence judgements, self-assessments about the quality of a subject's knowledge, are considered a central example of metacognition. Prima facie, introspection and self-report appear the only way to access the subjective sense of confidence or uncertainty. Contrary to this notion, overt behavioural measures can be used to study confidence judgements by animals trained in decision-making tasks with perceptual or mnemonic uncertainty. ⋯ We present a case study using such a computational approach to study the neural correlates of decision confidence in rats. This work shows that confidence assessments may be considered higher order, but can be generated using elementary neural computations that are available to a wide range of species. Finally, we discuss the relationship of confidence judgements to the wider behavioural uses of confidence and uncertainty.
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Philos. Trans. R. Soc. Lond., B, Biol. Sci. · May 2012
Metacognition: computation, biology and function.
Many complex systems maintain a self-referential check and balance. In animals, such reflective monitoring and control processes have been grouped under the rubric of metacognition. ⋯ Specifically, we cover the definition, measurement, neurobiology and possible functions of metacognition, and assess the relationship between metacognition and consciousness. We propose a framework in which level of representation, order of behaviour and access consciousness are orthogonal dimensions of the conceptual landscape.
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Philos. Trans. R. Soc. Lond., B, Biol. Sci. · May 2012
ReviewMetacognition in human decision-making: confidence and error monitoring.
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. ⋯ 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.
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Philos. Trans. R. Soc. Lond., B, Biol. Sci. · May 2012
ReviewKinds of access: different methods for report reveal different kinds of metacognitive access.
In experimental investigations of consciousness, participants are asked to reflect upon their own experiences by issuing reports about them in different ways. For this reason, a participant needs some access to the content of her own conscious experience in order to report. ⋯ We argue that there is not only a theoretical, but also an empirical difference between different methods of reporting. We hypothesize that differences in the sensitivity of different scales may reveal that different types of access are used to issue direct reports about experiences and metacognitive reports about the classification process.