Metacognition in human decision-making: confidence and error monitoring

By Nick Yeung, Christopher Summerfield. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2012

626 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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. In this review, we consider progress in characterizing the neural and mechanistic basis of these related aspects of metacognition—confidence judgements and error monitoring—and identify crucial points of convergence between methods and theories in the two fields. 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.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, General Decision Sciences

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cdf4f9f19514456e80655970a3b698a477526db8

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cognitive Neuroscience

In General Decision Sciences

Citations in the corpus

The Divergence of Objective and Subjective Situation Awareness: A Meta-Analysis (2020, background): “Yeung and Summerfield (2012) show evidence that decision-related confidence assessments are based on both accumulated evidence (the quality of information signals and sufficiency of information) and post-decisional error monitoring processes.”
Global Workspace Theory (GWT) and Prefrontal Cortex: Recent Developments (2021, background): “Thus metacognition is extremely common in the stream of consciousness (Yeung and Summerfield, 2012).”
Post-decisional accounts of biases in confidence (2016, background): “Confidence, in this scenario, should reflect the uncertainty encoded by the probability distribution; namely, its inverse variance or precision [8 ,38].”
Undecidability and opacity of metacognition in animals and humans (2013, background): “We often stipulate—with qualifications—the flawed definition(s) and agent execution of cognition and metacognition (e.g., Shimamura and Metcalfe, 1994; Koriat and Goldsmith, 1996, 1998; Smith, 2009; Terrace and Son, 2009; Frith, 2012; Fleming et al., 2012; Yeung and Summerfield, 2012).”
Executive function and metacognition: Towards a unifying framework of cognitive self-regulation (2017, background): “At the same time and as Yeung and Summerfield (2012) point out, EF monitoring appears to be an all-or-none process (error detected or not), while MC monitoring is more graded and confidence can be reported on a continuum ranging from certainty to uncertainty.”
The Metacognitive Demands and Opportunities of Generative AI (2023, background): “Confidence is one’s self-assessment of one’s cognitive abilities and their application to tasks [206]—e.g., “How confident am I that I can write this email with the appropriate tone and level of detail?””
Self-Evaluation of Decision-Making: A General Bayesian Framework for Metacognitive Computation (2017, background): “However, an appropriate computational framework that sub-sumes both confidence and error detection is lacking (Yeung & Summerfield, 2012).”