Feeling lucky? Prospective and retrospective cues for sensorimotor confidence

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Motor Control
• Human Perception

Background:

• Sensorimotor confidence judgments are crucial for daily actions.
• Understanding the cues influencing these judgments is key to motor control research.
• Cues can be prospective (pre-action) or retrospective (post-action).

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate which sensory and motor-execution cues humans use for sensorimotor confidence.
• To determine the temporal availability of these cues during action evaluation.
• To model sensorimotor confidence using Bayesian inference.

Main Methods:

• Participants performed a reach-to-target task with an unseen hand.
• Confidence was reported by adjusting a circle size, incentivizing accuracy.
• Bayesian models incorporating prospective, retrospective, or both cue types were compared.

Main Results:

• Two distinct strategies emerged: ideal observers using both cue types, and those using only prospective cues.
• Retrospective cues were utilized in a secondary motor-awareness task.
• These retrospective cues were not consistently integrated into sensorimotor confidence judgments in the main task.

Conclusions:

• Humans can utilize retrospective cues for sensorimotor confidence but do not always do so.
• Individual strategies vary, with some acting as ideal observers and others relying on pre-action information.
• This highlights the flexible, yet not always optimal, nature of sensorimotor confidence computation.