Biology subjects

Locke, S. M.

Publications and source records attributed to Locke, S. M..

4 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2023

Sensorimotor Confidence for Tracking Eye Movements

For successful interactions with the world, we often have to evaluate our own performance. Such metacognitive evaluations have been studied with perceptual decisions, but much less with respect to the evaluation of our own actions. While eye movements are one of the most frequent actions we perform, we are typically unaware of them. Here, we investigated if 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 for six seconds, 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. While the sensitivity in discriminating performance between better and worse trials was stable across sessions, for their judgements participants relied more on performance in the final seconds of each trial. This behavior matched previous reports when judging the quality of hand movements, although overall metacognitive sensitivity for eye movements was significantly lower. Together, these results provide an additional piece of evidence for sensorimotor confidence, and open interesting questions about why it differs across actions and how it could be related to other instances of confidence. Statement of RelevanceIn everyday life, it is often critical to be able to evaluate the quality of our own cognitive decisions and actions. However, one of our most frequent actions often does not even reach our awareness: eye movements. We investigated whether observers were able to successfully judge the accuracy of their eye movements when tracking a cloud of dots that followed an unpredictable trajectory. We found that observers were able to distinguish good from bad trials, although sensitivity was lower compared to equivalent previous reports when judging the quality of hand movements. These results add an item to the growing list of our metacognitive abilities, but critically for eye movements that we are typically unaware of. They lead to important novel questions about why metacognitive abilities differ across decisions or different types of actions, and what the potential components of metacognitive abilities might be.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2022

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 motorexecution 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 motorawareness task, but these cues are not always included in the computation of sensorimotor confidence. Author SummarySensorimotor confidence is a secondary judgment about how successful we feel a motor action was with relation to the goal. To make this judgment we can draw on information available before we execute an action such as our past experiences and knowledge of the environment, as well as after the action including visual feedback and proprioception, a sense of where our body is in space. In this study, we inquired as to how the information available before and after an action is weighted when considering the final feeling of sensorimotor confidence. To do so we asked participants to make reaches to visually cued targets in an unseen hand task, then report their confidence in how successful they were at hitting the target. We measured each participants reach accuracy and proprioceptive sensitivity in a separate task. Using mathematical models to fit our data we tested if a given participant depended more heavily on prior information or retrospective information when making their confidence judgment. We found that participants with high proprioceptive uncertainty were more likely to focus on prior knowledge while those with a more exact sense of proprioception incorporated information from both time points.

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bioRxiv2019

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 performance? Or do they rely on cues to sensorimotor uncertainty to infer how likely it is they performed well? We investigated motor metacognition in two visuomotor tracking experiments, where participants followed an unpredictably moving dot cloud with a mouse cursor as it followed a random 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 targets 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, with the temporal analysis revealing a recency effect, where error later in the trial had a greater influence on the sensorimotor confidence. In sum, these results indicate humans predominantly monitor their tracking performance, albeit inefficiently, to judge sensorimotor confidence. HighlightsO_LIParticipants consciously reflected on their tracking performance with some accuracy C_LIO_LISensorimotor confidence was influenced by recent errors C_LIO_LIExpectations of task difficulty did not play a large role in sensorimotor confidence C_LIO_LIMetacognitive sensitivity of binary confidence judgements on continuous performance can be quantified with standard non-parametric techniques C_LI

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bioRxiv2019

Priors and Payoffs in Confidence Judgments

1Priors and payoffs are known to affect perceptual decision-making, but little is understood about how they influence confidence judgments. For optimal perceptual decision-making, both priors and payoffs should be considered when selecting a response. However, for confidence to reflect the probability of being correct in a perceptual decision, priors should affect confidence but payoffs should not. To experimentally test whether human observers follow this normative behavior, we conducted an orientation-discrimination task with varied priors and payoffs, probing both perceptual and metacognitive decision-making. We then examined the placement of discrimination and confidence criteria according to several plausible Signal Detection Theory models. In the normative model, observers use the optimal discrimination criterion (i.e., the criterion that maximizes expected gain) and confidence criteria that shift with the discrimination criterion that maximizes accuracy (i.e., are not affected by payoffs). No observer was consistent with this model, with the majority exhibiting non-normative confidence behavior. One subset of observers ignored both priors and payoffs for confidence, always fixing the confidence criteria around the neutral discrimination criterion. The other group of observers incorrectly incorporated payoffs into their confidence by always shifting their confidence criteria with the same gains-maximizing criterion used for discrimination. Such metacognitive mistakes could have negative consequences outside the laboratory setting, particularly when priors or payoffs are not matched for all the possible decision alternatives.

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