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Unexpected arousal modulates the influence of sensory noise on confidence

Allen, M; Frank, D; Schwarzkopf, DS; Fardo, F; Winston, JS; Hauser, TU; Rees, G; (2016) Unexpected arousal modulates the influence of sensory noise on confidence. eLife , 5 , Article e18103. 10.7554/eLife.18103.001. Green open access

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Abstract

Human perception is invariably accompanied by a graded feeling of confidence that guides metacognitive awareness and decision-making. It is often assumed that this arises solely from the feed-forward encoding of the strength or precision of sensory inputs. In contrast, interoceptive inference models suggest that confidence reflects a weighted integration of sensory precision and expectations about internal states, such as arousal. Here we test this hypothesis using a novel psychophysical paradigm, in which unseen disgust-cues induced unexpected, unconscious arousal just before participants discriminated motion signals of variable precision. Across measures of perceptual bias, uncertainty, and physiological arousal we found that arousing disgust cues modulated the encoding of sensory noise. Furthermore, the degree to which trial-by-trial pupil fluctuations encoded this nonlinear interaction correlated with trial level confidence. Our results suggest that unexpected arousal regulates perceptual precision, such that subjective confidence reflects the integration of both external sensory and internal, embodied states.

Type: Article
Title: Unexpected arousal modulates the influence of sensory noise on confidence
Location: England
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.7554/eLife.18103.001
Publisher version: https://elifesciences.org/lookup/doi/10.7554/eLife...
Language: English
Additional information: Copyright © 2016, Allen et al. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
Keywords: arousal, cardiac responses, confidence, human, interoceptive inference, metacognition, neuroscience, pupillometry
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology > Imaging Neuroscience
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1522491
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