The neural basis of metacognition

SEDEÑO, LUCAS; GARCÍA-CODERO, INDIRA; MARTORELL CARO, MIGUEL; BABINO, ANDRÉS; MELLONI, MARGHERITA; GARCÍA, ADOLFO M.; SIGMAN, MARIANO; DOTTORI, MARTÍN; MANES, FACUNDO; IBÁÑEZ, AGUSTÍN

San Francisco

Encuentro; 2018 Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience; 2019

Society for Neuroscience

Metacognition, the self-knowledge about mental abilities, is a complex multidimensional neurocognitive phenomenon. While neuroscientific research on this domain has accrued in recent years, only a few studies have compared metacognitive performance across brain pathologies and none has applied a multiple lesion model approach combined with neuroimaging (MRI) analysis. To bridge this gap, we evaluated explicit and implicit metacognitive dimensions in patients with focal frontal-insular lesions (FIS) and two types of dementia ?behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD) and Alzheimer?s disease (AD)? characterized by damage in key metacognitive areas. Participants performed a visual perception task and provided two types of metacognitive report: confidence (explicit judgment of trust about the performance) and wagering (implicit reports which consisted in betting on their accuracy in the perceptual task). Then, damaged areas were analyzed via structural MRI to identify an association with impaired metacognitive outcomes. In AD, inadequate confidence judgments were accompanied by poor wagering performance, demonstrating cross-dimensional (explicit and implicit) metacognitive impairments. In contrast, disorders of implicit metacognition in bvFTD and FIS patients occurred in the context of accurate confidence reports, suggesting a reduced ability to turn their self-knowledge into appropriate wagering conducts. Also, MRI analysis showed that ventromedial compromise was involved in overconfidence, whereas fronto-temporo-insular damage was associated with excessive wagering. Finally, by using machine learning classification we shown that behavioral measures combined with specific neuroimaging results provided relevant information to discriminate between groups. Therefore, joint assessment of explicit and implicit dimensions of metacognition could favor a better differentiation of neurological profiles (frontal damage vs AD) and eventually contribute to delineating clinical interventions. In addition, our work also presents a novel approach to disentangle explicit and implicit metacognitive dimensions and examine their mapping on partially differential neural substrates.