SciCombinator

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.

Point-of-care ultrasonography (POCUS) is a widely used tool in emergency and critical care settings, useful in the decision-making process as well as in interventional guidance. While having an impressive diagnostic accuracy in the hands of highly skilled operators, inexperienced practitioners must be aware of some common misinterpretations that may lead to wrong decisions at the bedside.

Consistency, quality, and duration of sleep are important determinants of health. We describe sleep patterns among demographically defined subgroups from the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System reported in 4 successive biennial representative samples of American high school students (2007 to 2013). Across the 4 waves of data collection, 6.2% to 7.7% of females and 8.0% to 9.4% of males reported obtaining 9 or more hours of sleep. Insufficient duration of sleep is pervasive among American high school students. Despite substantive public health implications, intervention research on this topic has received little attention.

To determine the relationship between sleep quality and CSF markers of Alzheimer disease (AD) pathology in late midlife.

The pupil is primarily regulated by prevailing light levels but is also modulated by perceptual and attentional factors. We measured pupil-size in typical adult humans viewing a bistable-rotating cylinder, constructed so the luminance of the front surface changes with perceived direction of rotation. In some participants, pupil diameter oscillated in phase with the ambiguous perception, more dilated when the black surface was in front. Importantly, the magnitude of oscillation predicts autistic traits of participants, assessed by the Autism-Spectrum Quotient AQ. Further experiments suggest that these results are driven by differences in perceptual styles: high AQ participants focus on the front surface of the rotating cylinder, while those with low AQ distribute attention to both surfaces in a more global, holistic style. This is the first evidence that pupillometry reliably tracks inter-individual differences in perceptual styles; it does so quickly and objectively, without interfering with spontaneous perceptual strategies.

Numerous studies have shown that diagnostic failure depends upon a variety of factors. Psychological factors are fundamental in influencing the cognitive performance of the decision maker. In this first of two papers, we discuss the basics of reasoning and the Dual Process Theory (DPT) of decision making. The general properties of the DPT model, as it applies to diagnostic reasoning, are reviewed. A variety of cognitive and affective biases are known to compromise the decision-making process. They mostly appear to originate in the fast intuitive processes of Type 1 that dominate (or drive) decision making. Type 1 processes work well most of the time but they may open the door for biases. Removing or at least mitigating these biases would appear to be an important goal. We will also review the origins of biases. The consensus is that there are two major sources: innate, hard-wired biases that developed in our evolutionary past, and acquired biases established in the course of development and within our working environments. Both are associated with abbreviated decision making in the form of heuristics. Other work suggests that ambient and contextual factors may create high risk situations that dispose decision makers to particular biases. Fatigue, sleep deprivation and cognitive overload appear to be important determinants. The theoretical basis of several approaches towards debiasing is then discussed. All share a common feature that involves a deliberate decoupling from Type 1 intuitive processing and moving to Type 2 analytical processing so that eventually unexamined intuitive judgments can be submitted to verification. This decoupling step appears to be the critical feature of cognitive and affective debiasing.

In people’s imagination, dying seems dreadful; however, these perceptions may not reflect reality. In two studies, we compared the affective experience of people facing imminent death with that of people imagining imminent death. Study 1 revealed that blog posts of near-death patients with cancer and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis were more positive and less negative than the simulated blog posts of nonpatients-and also that the patients' blog posts became more positive as death neared. Study 2 revealed that the last words of death-row inmates were more positive and less negative than the simulated last words of noninmates-and also that these last words were less negative than poetry written by death-row inmates. Together, these results suggest that the experience of dying-even because of terminal illness or execution-may be more pleasant than one imagines.

We have previously found that attention to internal somatic sensations (interoceptive attention) during a heart beat perception task increases the misperception of external touch on a somatic signal detection task (SSDT), during which healthy participants erroneously report feeling near-threshold vibrations presented to their fingertip in the absence of a stimulus. However, it has been suggested that mindful interoceptive attention should result in more accurate somatic perception, due to its non-evaluative and controlled nature. To investigate this possibility, 62 participants completed the SSDT before and after a period of brief body-scan mindfulness meditation training, or a control intervention (listening to a recorded story). The meditation intervention reduced tactile misperception and increased sensitivity during the SSDT. This finding suggests that the perceptual effects of interoceptive attention depend on its particular nature, and raises the possibility that body-scan meditation could reduce the misperception of physical symptoms in individuals with medically unexplained symptoms.

Insufficient sleep is a global public health problem resulting in catastrophic accidents, increased mortality, and hundreds of billions of dollars in lost productivity. Yet the effect of sleep deprivation (SD) on decision making and performance is often underestimated by fatigued individuals and is only beginning to be understood by scientists. The deleterious impact of SD is frequently attributed to lapses in vigilant attention, but this account fails to explain many SD-related problems, such as loss of situational awareness and perseveration. Using a laboratory study protocol, we show that SD individuals can maintain information in the focus of attention and anticipate likely correct responses, but their use of such a top-down attentional strategy is less effective at preventing errors caused by competing responses. Moreover, when the task environment requires flexibility, performance under SD suffers dramatically. The impairment in flexible shifting of attentional control we observed is distinct from lapses in vigilant attention, as corroborated by the specificity of the influence of a genetic biomarker, the dopaminergic polymorphism DRD2 C957T. Reduced effectiveness of top-down attentional control under SD, especially when conditions require flexibility, helps to explain maladaptive performance that is not readily explained by lapses in vigilant attention.

Choice confidence represents the degree of belief one’s actions are likely to be correct or rewarding and plays a critical role in optimising our decisions. Despite progress in understanding the neurobiology of human perceptual decision-making, little is known about the representation of confidence. Importantly, it remains unclear whether confidence forms an integral part of the decision process itself or represents a purely post-decisional signal. To address this issue we employed a paradigm whereby on some trials, prior to indicating their decision, participants could opt-out of the task for a small but certain reward. This manipulation captured participants' confidence on individual trials and allowed us to discriminate between electroencephalographic signals associated with certain-vs-uncertain trials. Discrimination increased gradually and peaked well before participants indicated their choice. These signals exhibited a temporal profile consistent with a process of evidence accumulation, culminating at time of peak discrimination. Moreover, trial-by-trial fluctuations in the accumulation rate of nominally identical stimuli were predictive of participants' likelihood to opt-out of the task, suggesting confidence emerges from the decision process itself and is computed continuously as the process unfolds. Correspondingly, source reconstruction placed these signals in regions previously implicated in decision making, within the prefrontal and parietal cortices. Crucially, control analyses ensured that these results could not be explained by stimulus difficulty, lapses in attention or decision accuracy.