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There Are Things That We Know That We Know, and There Are Things That We Do Not Know We Do Not Know: Confidence in Decision-making

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Date 2015 May 2
PMID 25929444
Citations 35
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Abstract

Metacognition, the ability to think about our own thoughts, is a fundamental component of our mental life and is involved in memory, learning, planning and decision-making. Here we focus on one aspect of metacognition, namely confidence in perceptual decisions. We review the literature in psychophysics, neuropsychology and neuroscience. Although still a very new field, several recent studies suggest there are specific brain circuits devoted to monitoring and reporting confidence, whereas others suggest that confidence information is encoded within decision-making circuits. We provide suggestions, based on interdisciplinary research, to disentangle these disparate results.

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