Seeing where our brains think about our thinking

More fascinating work from Ray Dolan's group at the Wellcome Trust Center for Neuroimaging at University College, London:

Neuroscience has made considerable progress in understanding the neural substrates supporting cognitive performance in a number of domains, including memory, perception, and decision making. In contrast, how the human brain generates metacognitive awareness of task performance remains unclear. Here, we address this question by asking participants to perform perceptual decisions while providing concurrent metacognitive reports during fMRI scanning. We show that activity in right rostrolateral prefrontal cortex (rlPFC) satisfies three constraints for a role in metacognitive aspects of decision-making. Right rlPFC showed greater activity during self-report compared to a matched control condition, activity in this region correlated with reported confidence, and the strength of the relationship between activity and confidence predicted metacognitive ability across individuals. In addition, functional connectivity between right rlPFC and both contralateral PFC and visual cortex increased during metacognitive reports. We discuss these findings in a theoretical framework where rlPFC re-represents object-level decision uncertainty to facilitate metacognitive report.

I'll also pass on Figure 5 and it's legend from the text:

Individual difference and connectivity analyses. The top panel illustrates the significant correlation between confidence-related activity in right rlPFC and metacognitive accuracy across subjects. The bottom panel depicts results of an exploratory psychophysiological interaction analysis (displayed at p < 0.001, uncorrected), revealing whole-brain corrected (p < 0.05) increases in connectivity between right rlPFC and visual cortex (lingual gyrus) and between right rlPFC and left dlPFC in Report compared to Follow trials.