The neural basis of metacognitive ability

By Stephen M. Fleming, R. J. Dolan. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2012

702 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Ability in various cognitive domains is often assessed by measuring task performance, such as the accuracy of a perceptual categorization. A similar analysis can be applied to metacognitive reports about a task to quantify the degree to which an individual is aware of his or her success or failure. Here, we review the psychological and neural underpinnings of metacognitive accuracy, drawing on research in memory and decision-making. These data show that metacognitive accuracy is dissociable from task performance and varies across individuals. Convergent evidence indicates that the function of the rostral and dorsal aspect of the lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) is important for the accuracy of retrospective judgements of performance. In contrast, prospective judgements of performance may depend upon medial PFC. We close with a discussion of how metacognitive processes relate to concepts of cognitive control, and propose a neural synthesis in which dorsolateral and anterior prefrontal cortical subregions interact with interoceptive cortices (cingulate and insula) to promote accurate judgements of performance.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6067b80d698ec3f84bd5329f7154f302e0cde788

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In Cognitive Neuroscience

Citations in the corpus

Executive function and metacognition: Towards a unifying framework of cognitive self-regulation (2017, background): “The anterior and dorsolateral PFC, by contrast, seem aligned to retrospective monitoring judgments, that is, to confidence judgments (Fleming & Dolan, 2012).”
Prefrontal contributions to metacognition in perceptual decision-making (2012, background): “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.”
Investigating the Phenomenological Matrix of Mindfulness-related Practices from a Neurocognitive Perspective (2015, background): “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).”
Metacognition: computation, biology and function (2012, background): “Often, researchers restrict the deﬁnition of metacognition to the kind of second-order behaviour available for subjective report [6].”
Self-Evaluation of Decision-Making: A General Bayesian Framework for Metacognitive Computation (2017, background): “…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).”
Undecidability and opacity of metacognition in animals and humans (2013, background): “…(1) poor subjective accessibility to the cognition and metacognition of animals and humans of limited or no language proficiency (cf. Hampton, 2009; Fleming and Dolan, 2012; Kepecs and Mainen, 2012; Smith et al., 2012), (2) the synergism and antagonism of unreliable explicit and implicit…”