🤔The Bayesian Brain: Your brain is constantly guessing about the world around you. Noisy sensory input is combined with prior knowledge to form a best estimate of reality. This process explains why our perceptions can be biased and, at times, lead to systematic errors in judgment.
🤔Multisensory Integration: The world around us consists of signals of many forms that our senses receive. To process this information, the brain must determine which signals belong together.
Ex: in a cinema we see people on screen speaking and hear the words, which is combined into a single event.
🤔What determines our confidence?
Imagine you’re looking for something in the dark - because you’re less certain about the world around you, you’ll feel less confident in what you see.
Uncertainty can act as a signal for confidence, causing you to put more effort in - or just switch on a light!
Metacognition ppl, check out this upgraded hmetad package for estimating metacognitive metrics (e.g., M-ratio)!
☑️More efficient
☑️Easier to implement
☑️Comprehensive documentation
☑️New non-confounded measure of metacognitive bias (meta-delta)
I’ve just applied this model to my data - working nicely!
🤔 Metacognitive Bias is the tendency for our confidence to be consistently higher/lower than our accuracy. Some people feel more confident than their performance deserves, while others doubt themselves even when they are right. These biases can shape the way we act and the decisions we make.
Graphical abstract showing three panels. Left panel, "Multiorgan Interoception Measures," depicts a translucent human body silhouette with anatomically rendered heart (red) and lungs (blue), accompanied by schematic icons for three psychophysical tasks: the Respiratory Resistance Sensitivity Task (RRST), Heart Rate Discrimination Task (HRDT), and an auditory control condition. N = 241 participants. Center panel, "Psychophysical Modelling and Individual Differences," shows a fan of overlapping sigmoid psychometric curves in blue-to-red gradient representing individual variation in perceptual threshold (α) and precision (β), a hierarchical Bayesian model diagram, and icons for metacognitive bias and M-Ratio efficiency. Right panel, "Key Finding: No Cross-Modal Relationship," displays a scatterplot of cardiac versus respiratory sensitivity with a flat regression line (r ≈ 0, BF₀₁ > 6), a compact Bayes Factor heatmap with mostly blue null-supporting cells and one orange cell indicating that subjective confidence is shared across modalities (r = 0.51***). Takeaway: interoceptive ability is modality-specific.
Is there a single "interoceptive sense"? Our new study in
@commspsychol.nature.com says: probably not. In 241 participants, cardiac and respiratory interoception were completely uncorrelated — only subjective confidence was shared across domains. www.nature.com/articles/s44... #psychscisky 🧪
When we are confident about our decisions,we actually evaluate how accurate we are in predicting the outcome of such decisions, without external feedback.Our evaluation is better when we examine actions we already made, suggesting that experiencing the decision better calibrates our self-evaluation.
🤔Metacognitive efficiency measures to what extent our confidence tracks our actual performance. We generally feel more confident when we’re right than when we’re wrong. However, interestingly, this ability also changes depending on the situation we’re in and varies across the population.
How does uncertainty transmit from one head to another? Our new paper out today in @currentbiology.bsky.social reveals how public communication alters private confidence.
w/ Einar Andreassen & @cdfrith.bsky.social
@birkbeckpsychology.bsky.social
@leverhulme.ac.uk
🧠📈
🤔 Confidence Control. Our sense of confidence is a powerful guide for our behavior. It shapes many of the decisions we make every day: we might search for more information when we feel uncertain, ignore irrelevant feedback when we feel very confident, or adjust how we approach learning.
🤔Confidence Matching is the tendency for people making decisions together to unconsciously align their expressed confidence levels with each other,rather than with the actual reliability of their own knowledge, turning confidence into a social signal rather than a metacognitive measure. 💭
@mamassian.bsky.social, @kobedesender.bsky.social, @smfleming.bsky.social @dsotob.bsky.social @silvialogu.bsky.social @lauradelaere.bsky.social @alelorcavyhmeister.bsky.social @tianqizhan.bsky.social @rioraimundo.bsky.social @francisca-c-matias.bsky.social
Just wrapped up our amazing CODE intermediate meeting at @bcbl.bsky.social in San Sebastián 🌊!
Our PhD students shared their progress, and we got to hear incredible keynotes from Silvia Lopez-Guzman, Máté Lengyel, and Robbe Goris. So many great conversations! Excited for what’s next🚀!
#MSCA
International Day of Women in Science! Congratulations to all the women we have in this consortium! 🥁 🤩 Our PhDs: @Alessandra @francisca-c-matias.bsky.social @thelucidneuron.bsky.social @lauradelaere.bsky.social @tianqizhan.bsky.social Our PIs:Elisa Filevich,Janneke Jehee,Ruth van Holst,Uta Noppeney
Are you sure there’s no mosquito in the room?
With @matanmazor.bsky.social, Chichi Dézier, @nfaivre.bsky.social & Louise Goupil, we study how we combine multiple sensory sources to be confident in presence and absence: While detection rely on one modality, confidence requires both channels to align!
This research by @magdadelrio.bsky.social et al. finds a strong recency bias in information gathering, attenuated in those on the OCD spectrum. Behavioural and MEG data show reduced evidence updating and in high-OC individuals. #OCD #GAD #MEG
So excited to see this lovely paper with @benjyb.bsky.social, @matanmazor.bsky.social and @giuliacabbai.bsky.social published in @nconsc.bsky.social!
academic.oup.com/nc/article/2...
New pre-print! **Confidence phenotypes: a unified computational account of value and decision certainty in reinforcement learning** by @ncomay.bsky.social, @guillermosolovey.bsky.social & @pablobarttfeld.bsky.social. osf.io/preprints/ps.... Feedback is welcome!
Women and people with anxiety are both prone to low confidence in their own abilities, but a new study by Dr @sucharit.bsky.social and Prof @smfleming.bsky.social @uclpals.bsky.social @uclbrainscience.bsky.social has found that the two groups are prone to two distinct types of underconfidence
New preprint: Confidence-accuracy dissociations in perceptual decision making. A review I was supposed to write 3 years ago for my VSS Young Investigator Award. Better late than never 😅 I tried to organize the literature and explore the likely mechanisms. Feedback welcome!
osf.io/preprints/ps...
🚨 New article in #NCONSC
Perceptual and attentional uncertainty impact global performance monitoring
academic.oup.com/nc/article/2...
#consciousness
🧠🧪
Marika's latest study is out, showing that her previous results (priors affect confidence more than decisions) hold and generalise to long-term, "real" priors, not just those fake ones we induce in the lab.
This is one of two recent articles from my two wonderful (ex) PhD-students.
Congratulations to Francisca Campos, a PhD student of our network 🥳. She was recently interviewed about her research! 🎉
"How disconfirmatory evidence shapes confidence in decision-making"! Now out in @commspsychol.nature.com
w @annikaboldt.bsky.social & Yishu Sun
Paper: www.nature.com/articles/s44... Thread ↓↓↓
#PsychSciSky #Neuroscience #Neuroskyence #Metacognition #Confidence
Get to know our PhD students!👁️🗨️🎉 Thomas Hawkins, supervised by Janneke Jehee and Uta Noppeney, investigates the temporal dynamics of perceptual uncertainty and develops new methods to measure uncertainty directly from brain signals.
Get to know our PhD students!👁️🗨️🎉 Alexandre Lietard, supervised by Kobe Desender, studies how confidence helps us balance exploring new possibilities and exploiting what we already know, using a Bayesian framework to model adaptive behavior.
Get to know our PhD students!👁️🗨️🎉 Francisca Matias, supervised by David Soto and Pascal Mamassian, studies metacognition in children: how confidence develops, how peers shape self-monitoring, and how neuropsychiatric traits influence learning.
Get to know our PhD students!👁️🗨️🎉 Luis Glenzer, supervised by Uta Noppeney and Janneke Jehee, explores perceptual and causal uncertainty in multisensory perception using fMRI, Bayesian modelling, and neural decoding.
Get to know our PhD students!👁️🗨️🎉 Tianqi Zhan, supervised by Steve Fleming, investigates the individual differences in metacognitive monitoring and control using behavioral experiments and computational approaches.
Get to know our PhD students!👁️🗨️🎉 Laura De Laere, supervised by Ruth van Holst and Pascal Mamassian, studies how decision confidence is altered in compulsive disorders using computational modeling.