Relating introspective accuracy to individual differences in brain structure

By Stephen M. Fleming, R. Weil, Zoltán Nagy, R. J. Dolan, Geraint E. Rees. 2010

686 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Naval Gazing Simple perceptual tasks, such as detecting the contrast between light and dark bars in a grating, have been a mainstay of psychophysical research for decades. This kind of task makes it possible to obtain both an objective measure of how accurate subjects are and a subjective measure of how confident they are in their judgments. Fleming et al. (p. 1541; see the Perspective by Lau and Maniscalco) have taken this approach one step further by constructing a measure of how accurate subjects are in their confidence judgments. This capacity for introspection, which can be regarded as one facet of metacognition (thinking about thinking), is shown to vary across individuals and to correlate positively with the gray matter volume of the frontopolar cortex (the frontmost region of the brain) and also with white matter in the tracts of the corpus callosum that connect these regions in the left and right hemispheres. Individual differences in the capacity for introspection are reflected in structural variation in the frontal lobe. The ability to introspect about self-performance is key to human subjective experience, but the neuroanatomical basis of this ability is unknown. Such accurate introspection requires discriminating correct decisions from incorrect ones, a capacity that varies substantially across individuals. We dissociated variation in introspective ability from objective performance in a simple perceptual-decision task, allowing us to determine whether this interindividual variability was associated with a distinct neural basis. We show that introspective ability is correlated with gray matter volume in the anterior prefrontal cortex, a region that shows marked evolutionary development in humans. Moreover, interindividual variation in introspective ability is also correlated with white-matter microstructure connected with this area of the prefrontal cortex. Our findings point to a focal neuroanatomical substrate for introspective ability, a substrate distinct from that supporting primary perception.

Subfields: Behavioral Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience

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Citations in the corpus

The entropic brain: a theory of conscious states informed by neuroimaging research with psychedelic drugs (2014, background): “As outlined above, metacognition, and speciﬁcally the ability to reﬂect upon one’s own introspection, is a particularly advanced behavior associated with the DMN (Fleming et al., 2010).”
Mechanisms of social cognition. (2012, background): “…pointing (Cleret de Langavant et al. 2011) Estimation of the reliability of our knowledge (Lau 2007) Anterior PFC (BA10) Judgment of perception (Fleming et al. 2010) Judgment of agency (Miele et al. 2011) mPFC Judgment of strategy of others (Coricelli & Nagel 2009) Uncertainty about partner’s…”
How to measure metacognition (2014, methodology): “One approach to dealing with this confound is to use psychophysical techniques to control for differences in performance and then calculate AUROC2 (e.g., Fleming et al., 2010).”
Emotion and the Prefrontal Cortex: An Integrative Review (2017, background): “, BA 10) has been linked to internally oriented cognitive processes (Burgess, Dumontheil, & Gilbert, 2007; Christoff & Gabrieli, 2000) including metacognitive awareness— the ability to reflect on and accurately report one’s mental contents (Baird, Smallwood, Gorgolewski, & Margulies, 2013; De Martin”
Dissecting the social brain: Introducing the EmpaToM to reveal distinct neural networks and brain-behavior relations for empathy and Theory of Mind (2015, neutral): “A last rating concerned participants' confidence with their preceeding response to allow assessment of metacognitive abilities (Fleming et al., 2010).2 In sum, the paradigm follows a two by two factorial design with videos depiciting stories with (a) negative or neutral emotional valence (later…”
Metacognition: computation, biology and function (2012, background): “However, recent attempts to distil metacognition from other potentially confounding variables have led to a seeming paradox: if, to measure metacognition, one needs ﬁrst to discount the inﬂuence of ﬁrst-order behaviour [27,42], then the functional beneﬁts of metacognitive capacity would appear moot.”
Self-Evaluation of Decision-Making: A General Bayesian Framework for Metacognitive Computation (2017, background): “…evidence supports its role in human metacognition (Baird, Smallwood, Gorgolewski, & Margulies, 2013; De Martino et al., 2013; Del Cul et al., 2009; Fleming et al., 2010, 2012; 2014; Hilgenstock et al., 2014; Mc-Curdy et al., 2013; Miele, Wager, Mitchell, & Metcalfe, 2011; Yokoyama et al., 2010).”