Confidence in adaptive decision-making

The capacity for introspection and self-evaluation of our own thoughts and behaviours is a fundamental aspect of human cognition. Central to this faculty is the judgement of confidence in our beliefs and decisions, particularly in situations in which external feedback is sparse or absent. This thesis explores the critical role of confidence judgements in adaptive decision-making, substantiated by empirical research within the rigorously controlled environment of perceptual decision tasks. The first line of research probes the flexibility of confidence-guided information seeking behaviour. Findings illustrate a flexible interplay between confidence and information-seeking choices, contingent upon reward structures and the usefulness of information. However, the findings also unveil the boundaries of such flexibility, revealing a reliance on heuristic strategies, wherein a decrease in confidence generally prompts the need for more information, when dealing with more nuanced aspects of the choice environment. The second line of research investigates the context-sensitive role of confidence within social settings, uncovering distinct impacts of informational and normative social influences on confidence. The results indicate that in contexts devoid of feedback, individuals utilise others' confidence judgements as a benchmark to calibrate their own. Furthermore, under normative social influences, individuals strategically adapt their overt communication of confidence to suit the contextual demands. The third line of research examines the link between confidence biases and maladaptive behaviours, focusing on the example of problem gamblers. This inquiry reveals that problem gamblers display heightened decision confidence, yet concurrently exhibit reduced self-esteem compared to a control group. Such overconfidence may be a contributing factor to perpetuating gambling behaviours, which highlights the necessity of well-calibrated confidence for adaptive behaviour. Collectively, these research lines emphasise that confidence is a multifaceted, context-sensitive mechanism, playing a key role in guiding adaptive behaviour. This thesis highlights the pervasive influence of confidence across various facets of human life –– from everyday decision-making to psychopathology –– thereby underlining its vital role in adaptive decision-making

Confirmation bias is adaptive when coupled with efficient metacognition

Biases in the consideration of evidence can reduce the chances of consensus between people with different viewpoints. While such altered information processing typically leads to detrimental performance in laboratory tasks, the ubiquitous nature of confirmation bias makes it unlikely that selective information processing is universally harmful. Here, we suggest that confirmation bias is adaptive to the extent that agents have good metacognition, allowing them to downweight contradictory information when correct but still able to seek new information when they realize they are wrong. Using simulation-based modelling, we explore how the adaptiveness of holding a confirmation bias depends on such metacognitive insight. We find that the behavioural consequences of selective information processing are systematically affected by agents' introspective abilities. Strikingly, we find that selective information processing can even improve decision-making when compared with unbiased evidence accumulation, as long as it is accompanied by good metacognition. These results further suggest that interventions which boost people's metacognition might be efficient in alleviating the negative effects of selective information processing on issues such as political polarization. This article is part of the theme issue 'The political brain: neurocognitive and computational mechanisms'

The role of decision confidence in advice-taking and trust formation

In a world where ideas flow freely between people across multiple platforms, we often find ourselves relying on others' information without an objective standard to judge whether those opinions are accurate. The present study tests an agreement-in-confidence hypothesis of advice perception, which holds that internal metacognitive evaluations of decision confidence play an important functional role in the perception and use of social information, such as peers' advice. We propose that confidence can be used, computationally, to estimate advisors' trustworthiness and advice reliability. Specifically, these processes are hypothesized to be particularly important in situations where objective feedback is absent or difficult to acquire. Here, we use a judge-advisor system paradigm to precisely manipulate the profiles of virtual advisors whose opinions are provided to participants performing a perceptual decision making task. We find that when advisors' and participants' judgments are independent, people are able to discriminate subtle advice features, like confidence calibration, whether or not objective feedback is available. However, when observers' judgments (and judgment errors) are correlated - as is the case in many social contexts - predictable distortions can be observed between feedback and feedback-free scenarios. A simple model of advice reliability estimation, endowed with metacognitive insight, is able to explain key patterns of results observed in the human data. We use agent-based modeling to explore implications of these individual-level decision strategies for network-level patterns of trust and belief formation

Cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying post-decision processing

Contested issues, such as climate change, can generate polarised and rigid views. A prominent source of entrenched beliefs is confirmation bias, where evidence against one’s position is selectively disregarded. Although an extensive literature has documented this altered processing of new information, the underlying cognitive, computational and neuronal mechanisms remain unknown. In this thesis, I explore the mechanisms underlying this altered processing of new information, its relation to broader societal attitudes, and finally I test an intervention to alleviate this cognitive bias. In a first set of studies, I combined human magnetoencephalography (MEG) with behavioural and neural modelling to identify the drivers of altered post-decision evidence integration. I show that high confidence in an initial decision leads to a striking modulation of post-decision neural processing, such that integration of confirmatory evidence is amplified while disconfirmatory evidence processing is abolished. This indicates that confidence shapes a selective neural gating for choice-consistent information, reducing the likelihood of changes of mind. Confirmation bias has received most attention for its potential contribution to societal polarization and entrenchment. Therefore, in a second set of studies, I tested whether cognitive alterations in post-decision evidence integration are related to broader societal attitudes, such as dogmatic and rigid political beliefs. I found that dogmatic participants showed a reduced sensitivity for disconfirming post-decision evidence (i.e. a stronger confirmation bias) and a reduced tendency to actively seek out corrective information. In a final study, I tested a metacognitive training procedure as a potential intervention to counteract confirmation bias. This training improved participants’ metacognitive ability and through this boosted their processing of post-decision evidence, both on a behavioural and neural level. These studies provide a novel mechanistic understanding of confirmation bias, exemplify the potential societal implications of altered post-decision processing and enabled an evidence-based intervention to counteract this cognitive bias

Judgments of effort exerted by others are influenced by received rewards

Estimating invested effort is a core dimension for evaluating own and others’ actions, and views on the relationship between effort and rewards are deeply ingrained in various societal attitudes. Internal representations of effort, however, are inherently noisy, e.g. due to the variability of sensorimotor and visceral responses to physical exertion. The uncertainty in effort judgments is further aggravated when there is no direct access to the internal representations of exertion – such as when estimating the effort of another person. Bayesian cue integration suggests that this uncertainty can be resolved by incorporating additional cues that are predictive of effort, e.g. received rewards. We hypothesized that judgments about the effort spent on a task will be influenced by the magnitude of received rewards. Additionally, we surmised that such influence might further depend on individual beliefs regarding the relationship between hard work and prosperity, as exemplified by a conservative work ethic. To test these predictions, participants performed an effortful task interleaved with a partner and were informed about the obtained reward before rating either their own or the partner’s effort. We show that higher rewards led to higher estimations of exerted effort in self-judgments, and this effect was even more pronounced for other-judgments. In both types of judgment, computational modelling revealed that reward information and sensorimotor markers of exertion were combined in a Bayes-optimal manner in order to reduce uncertainty. Remarkably, the extent to which rewards influenced effort judgments was associated with conservative world-views, indicating links between this phenomenon and general beliefs about the relationship between effort and earnings in society

Contributions of anterior cingulate cortex and basolateral amygdala to decision confidence and learning under uncertainty.

The subjective sense of certainty, or confidence, in ambiguous sensory cues can alter the interpretation of reward feedback and facilitate learning. We trained rats to report the orientation of ambiguous visual stimuli according to a spatial stimulus-response rule that must be learned. Following choice, rats could wait a self-timed delay for reward or initiate a new trial. Waiting times increase with discrimination accuracy, demonstrating that this measure can be used as a proxy for confidence. Chemogenetic silencing of BLA shortens waiting times overall whereas ACC inhibition renders waiting times insensitive to confidence-modulating attributes of visual stimuli, suggesting contribution of ACC but not BLA to confidence computations. Subsequent reversal learning is enhanced by confidence. Both ACC and BLA inhibition block this enhancement but via differential adjustments in learning strategies and consistent use of learned rules. Altogether, we demonstrate dissociable roles for ACC and BLA in transmitting confidence and learning under uncertainty

Social and cultural contributions to metacognition

Explicit metacognition is a hallmark of human consciousness. Its central role in the exchange of knowledge within social groups suggests that it may be shaped by social interactions. But whether, and how, social interactions may exert an effect on metacognition remains unknown. The experiments conducted in my PhD exemplify each in their own way how metacognitive ability is related to the ability to understand other people’s minds (mentalizing). Chapter Two and Three show that people with compromised mentalizing ability are also more likely to have metacognitive difficulties. Contrary to the common belief that people have privileged access to their own mental states, I found that people infer their mental states indirectly from their behaviour––similar to how they infer the mental states of others. Correspondingly, people who are unable make such inferences about others (as is the case in Autism Spectrum Condition or ASC) also tend to have difficulties with doing so about themselves. Chapter Four and Five show that cultural differences in collaboration and interaction affect metacognitive ability. Across two studies, I found that Chinese students had better awareness of their own and others’ mental states than occupation, age, income, gender and performance matched English students. This enhanced ability to process new evidence and correct errors generalized to how the different populations processed new social advice. Together, this work suggest that metacognition is deeply rooted in social interaction and culture