Nueral correlates of subjective confidende in visual decision-making
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2016-12-19
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en
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Abstract
Humans are able to reflect on the quality of their own decisions. With
each of our decisions, we associate a certain degree of confidence. Moreover,
recent work suggests that human observers use internal estimates
of sensory uncertainty when making decisions. This raises the question
whether confidence is a readout of such estimates, and if so, how and where
confidence is computed from uncertainty. Earlier research has suggested
a variety of brain areas potentially involved in the computation of confidence.
However, in those studies, stimulus properties were modulated to
induce variability in confidence, thereby providing subjects with cues regarding
stimulus difficulty and thus expected performance. Here, subjects
performed a visual decision task in which stimulus properties were held
constant across trials, such that confidence reports could only be based on
internal measures. Our data show that even without variability in stimulus
difficulty, humans are able to reflect on their own performance, suggesting
that confidence is at least partially based on internal estimates of
sensory uncertainty. We used fMRI to identify brain regions encoding confidence
during this task, and mainly found confidence-related activation in
the striatum, particularly in the head of the caudate nucleus and the nucleus
accumbens. Our results suggest that this region plays a key role in
the computation of confidence from internal estimates of uncertainty. This
work provides leads for future research on the neural mechanisms underlying
the computation of decision confidence and the role of uncertainty in
neural computations in general.
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Faculteit der Sociale Wetenschappen