Affective Brain Lab Seminar: Micah Allen

TITLE: Gut Feelings? Visceral and Autonomic Influences on Metacognitive Decision-Making

SPEAKER: Micah Allen (UCL)

ABSTRACT:

The metacognitive ability to monitor and control our thoughts, percepts, and actions is a core aspect of human decision-making. Thus far, most models of metacognition emphasize a feed-forward mechanism in which confidence is based solely on decision evidence or the probability to make a correct response. Empirically however, confidence and decision accuracy are often dissociated from one another, raising the possibility that an additional parallel mechanism underlies self-monitoring. Here I will present recent work demonstrating that unconscious, unexpected changes in autonomic arousal alter the weight afforded to sensory evidence in perceptual confidence. Further, pharmacological suppression of arousal appears to suppress such biases, leading to improved overall metacognitive accuracy. On the basis of these and related findings, I will suggest an alternative “interoceptive self-inference” mechanism supports metacognitive awareness, and outline some of the potential scientific and clinical implications of this model.