The Relationship between Perceptual Decision Variables and Confidence in the Human Brain

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Cognitive Science
• Perception

Background:

• Perceptual confidence, the belief in percept accuracy, is theoretically linked to an internal decision variable.
• Neural mechanisms underlying perceptual confidence and decision variables remain largely unknown.

Purpose of the Study:

• To identify human brain regions encoding the decision variable and perceptual confidence.
• To investigate the neural basis of confidence computation during a visual task.

Main Methods:

• Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and multivariate decoding techniques were employed.
• A visual motion discrimination task with confidence ratings was used.
• Internal decision variables were reconstructed from behavioral data.

Main Results:

• Prefrontal and posterior parietal cortex regions encoded the decision variable.
• Ventral striatum activity correlated with the degree of perceptual confidence.
• Multivariate connectivity analysis revealed a link between decision variable (prefrontal cortex) and confidence (ventral striatum) signals.

Conclusions:

• The ventral striatum represents perceptual confidence through a transformation of cortical decision variables.
• This study elucidates the neural circuitry underlying confidence judgments in perception.