Metacognitive judgements of perceptual-motor steering performance

Sensorimotor confidence for tracking eye movements

For successful interactions with the world, we often have to evaluate our own performance. Although eye movements are one of the most frequent actions we perform, we are typically unaware of them. Here, we investigated whether there is any evidence for metacognitive sensitivity for the accuracy of eye movements. Participants tracked a dot cloud as it followed an unpredictable sinusoidal trajectory and then reported if they thought their performance was better or worse than their average tracking performance. Our results show above-chance identification of better tracking behavior across all trials and also for repeated attempts of the same target trajectories. Sensitivity in discriminating performance between better and worse trials was stable across sessions, but judgements within a trial relied more on performance in the final seconds. This behavior matched previous reports when judging the quality of hand movements, although overall metacognitive sensitivity for eye movements was significantly lower.

Feeling lucky? prospective and retrospective cues for sensorimotor confidence

On a daily basis, humans interact with the outside world using judgments of sensorimotor confidence, constantly evaluating our actions for success. We ask, what sensory and motor-execution cues are used in making these judgements and when are they available? Two sources of temporally distinct information are prospective cues, available prior to the action (e.g., knowledge of motor noise and past performance), and retrospective cues specific to the action itself (e.g., proprioceptive measurements). We investigated the use of these two cues in two tasks, a secondary motor-awareness task and a main task in which participants reached toward a visual target with an unseen hand and then made a continuous judgment of confidence about the success of the reach. Confidence was reported by setting the size of a circle centered on the reach-target location, where a larger circle reflects lower confidence. Points were awarded if the confidence circle enclosed the true endpoint, with fewer points returned for larger circles. This incentivized accurate reaches and attentive reporting to maximize the score. We compared three Bayesian-inference models of sensorimotor confidence based on either prospective cues, retrospective cues, or both sources of information to maximize expected gain (i.e., an ideal-performance model). Our findings showed two distinct strategies: participants either performed as ideal observers, using both prospective and retrospective cues to make the confidence judgment, or relied solely on prospective information, ignoring retrospective cues. Thus, participants can make use of retrospective cues, evidenced by the behavior observed in our motor-awareness task, but these cues are not always included in the computation of sensorimotor confidence.

Motor outcomes congruent with intentions may sharpen metacognitive representations

We can monitor our intentional movements and form explicit representations about our movements, allowing us to describe how we move our bodies. But it is unclear which information this metacognitive monitoring relies on. For example, when throwing a ball to hit a target, we might use the visual information about how the ball flew to metacognitively assess our performance. Alternatively, we might disregard the ball trajectory - given that it is not directly relevant to our goal - and metacognitively assess our performance based solely on whether we reached the goal of hitting the target. In two experiments we aimed to distinguish between these two alternatives and asked whether the distal outcome of a goal-directed action (hitting or missing a target) informs the metacognitive representations of our own movements. Participants performed a semi-virtual task where they moved their arm to throw a virtual ball at a target. After each throw, participants discriminated which of two ball trajectories displayed on the screen corresponded to the flight path of their throw and then rated their confidence in this decision. The task included two conditions that differed on whether the distal outcome of the two trajectories shown matched (congruent) or differed (incongruent). Participants were significantly more accurate in discriminating between the two trajectories, and responded faster in the incongruent condition and, accordingly, were significantly more confident on these trials. Crucially, we found significant differences in metacognitive performance (measured as meta-d'/d') between the two conditions only on successful trials, where the virtual ball had hit the target. These results indicate that participants successfully incorporated information about the outcome of the movement into both their discrimination and confidence responses. However, information about the outcome selectively sharpened the precision of confidence ratings only when the outcome of their throw matched their intention. We argue that these findings underline the separation between the different levels of information that may contribute to body monitoring, and we provide evidence that intentions might play a central role in metacognitive motor representations.

Suprathreshold perceptual decisions constrain models of confidence

Perceptual confidence is an important internal signal about the certainty of our decisions and there is a substantial debate on how it is computed. We highlight three confidence metric types from the literature: observers either use 1) the full probability distribution to compute probability correct (Probability metrics), 2) point estimates from the perceptual decision process to estimate uncertainty (Evidence-Strength metrics), or 3) heuristic confidence from stimulus-based cues to uncertainty (Heuristic metrics). These metrics are rarely tested against one another, so we examined models of all three types on a suprathreshold spatial discrimination task. Observers were shown a cloud of dots sampled from a dot generating distribution and judged if the mean of the distribution was left or right of centre. In addition to varying the horizontal position of the mean, there were two sensory uncertainty manipulations: the number of dots sampled and the spread of the generating distribution. After every two perceptual decisions, observers made a confidence forced-choice judgement whether they were more confident in the first or second decision. Model results showed that the majority of observers were best-fit by either: 1) the Heuristic model, which used dot cloud position, spread, and number of dots as cues; or 2) an Evidence-Strength model, which computed the distance between the sensory measurement and discrimination criterion, scaled according to sensory uncertainty. An accidental repetition of some sessions also allowed for the measurement of confidence agreement for identical pairs of stimuli. This N-pass analysis revealed that human observers were more consistent than their best-fitting model would predict, indicating there are still aspects of confidence that are not captured by our modelling. As such, we propose confidence agreement as a useful technique for computational studies of confidence. Taken together, these findings highlight the idiosyncratic nature of confidence computations for complex decision contexts and the need to consider different potential metrics and transformations in the confidence computation.

Assessment of metacognition in aviation pilot students during simulated flight training of a demanding maneuver

This study adapted the Demand Resource Evaluation Scores (DRES) as a metacognitive indicator in assessing pilot students' perceptions during simulated training of a novel maneuver. Typically, positive DRES are associated with perceiving a demanding situation as a challenge and with improved performance, while negative DRES are linked to a perception of the situation as a threat, and to poorer performance. The novelty here was to assess DRES before and after the task and across three missions. Overall, students were found to change their perceptions from threat to challenge over time. Also, increased DRES were positively correlated with performance progressing from mission to mission, indicating that the students reflect on their performance as they advance in their training. These findings show that individual metacognitive evaluations of a stressful aviation maneuver might be important for the progress in performance. The results are discussed in terms of flight safety and pilot training.

Visual anticipation of the future path: Predictive gaze and steering

Skillful behavior requires the anticipation of future action requirements. This is particularly true during high-speed locomotor steering where solely detecting and correcting current error is insufficient to produce smooth and accurate trajectories. Anticipating future steering requirements could be supported using "model-free" prospective signals from the scene ahead or might rely instead on model-based predictive control solutions. The present study generated conditions whereby the future steering trajectory was specified using a breadcrumb trail of waypoints, placed at regular intervals on the ground to create a predictable course (a repeated series of identical "S-bends"). The steering trajectories and gaze behavior relative to each waypoint were recorded for each participant (N = 16). To investigate the extent to which drivers predicted the location of future waypoints, "gaps" were included (20% of waypoints) whereby the next waypoint in the sequence did not appear. Gap location was varied relative to the S-bend inflection point to manipulate the chances that the next waypoint indicated a change in direction of the bend. Gaze patterns did indeed change according to gap location, suggesting that participants were sensitive to the underlying structure of the course and were predicting the future waypoint locations. The results demonstrate that gaze and steering both rely upon anticipation of the future path consistent with some form of internal model.

Performance monitoring for sensorimotor confidence: A visuomotor tracking study

To best interact with the external world, humans are often required to consider the quality of their actions. Sometimes the environment furnishes rewards or punishments to signal action efficacy. However, when such feedback is absent or only partial, we must rely on internally generated signals to evaluate our performance (i.e., metacognition). Yet, very little is known about how humans form such judgements of sensorimotor confidence. Do they monitor their actual performance or do they rely on cues to sensorimotor uncertainty? We investigated sensorimotor metacognition in two visuomotor tracking experiments, where participants followed an unpredictably moving dot cloud with a mouse cursor as it followed a random horizontal trajectory. Their goal was to infer the underlying target generating the dots, track it for several seconds, and then report their confidence in their tracking as better or worse than their average. In Experiment 1, we manipulated task difficulty with two methods: varying the size of the dot cloud and varying the stability of the target's velocity. In Experiment 2, the stimulus statistics were fixed and duration of the stimulus presentation was varied. We found similar levels of metacognitive sensitivity in all experiments, which was evidence against the cue-based strategy. The temporal analysis of metacognitive sensitivity revealed a recency effect, where error later in the trial had a greater influence on the sensorimotor confidence, consistent with a performance-monitoring strategy. From these results, we conclude that humans predominantly monitored their tracking performance, albeit inefficiently, to build a sense of sensorimotor confidence.