Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, San Sebastian, Spain.
Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom.
Sci Rep. 2020 Apr 3;10(1):5854. doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-62719-z.
Metacognition can be deployed retrospectively -to reflect on the correctness of our behavior- or prospectively -to make predictions of success in one's future behavior or make decisions about strategies to solve future problems. We investigated the factors that determine prospective decision making. Human participants performed a visual discrimination task followed by ratings of visibility and response confidence. Prior to each trial, participants made prospective judgments. In Experiment 1, they rated their belief of future success. In Experiment 2, they rated their decision to adopt a focused attention state. Prospective beliefs of success were associated with no performance changes while prospective decisions to engage attention were followed by better self-evaluation of the correctness of behavioral responses. Using standard machine learning classifiers we found that the current prospective decision could be predicted from information concerning task-correctness, stimulus visibility and response confidence from previous trials. In both Experiments, awareness and confidence were more diagnostic of the prospective decision than task correctness. Notably, classifiers trained with prospective beliefs of success in Experiment 1 predicted decisions to engage in Experiment 2 and vice-versa. These results indicate that the formation of these seemingly different prospective decisions share a common, dynamic representational structure.
元认知可以被回溯性地运用——反思我们行为的正确性——或者前瞻性地运用——预测未来行为的成功或做出关于解决未来问题的策略的决策。我们研究了决定前瞻性决策的因素。人类参与者执行了一项视觉辨别任务，然后对可见性和反应信心进行了评分。在每次试验之前，参与者都要进行前瞻性判断。在实验 1 中，他们对未来成功的信念进行了评分。在实验 2 中，他们对是否采用集中注意力状态做出了决定。对未来成功的前瞻性信念与行为反应正确性的自我评估没有变化，而前瞻性决策参与注意力则会更好。使用标准的机器学习分类器，我们发现当前的前瞻性决策可以从前一个试验的任务正确性、刺激可见性和反应信心的信息中预测出来。在两个实验中，意识和信心比任务正确性更能诊断前瞻性决策。值得注意的是，在实验 1 中使用前瞻性成功信念训练的分类器可以预测到实验 2 中的决策，反之亦然。这些结果表明，这些看似不同的前瞻性决策的形成共享一个共同的、动态的表示结构。
