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The Cognitive and Neural Mechanism of Decision-Making Confidence

Author: ChenJing
Tutor: FengTingYong
School: Southwestern University
Course: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Keywords: fMRI decision-making confidence decision-making cognitive mechanism neural mechanism
CLC: B842.1
Type: Master's thesis
Year: 2011
Downloads: 149
Quote: 4
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Abstract

Decision-making Confidence is the level of confidence of the optimization or correctness of individual decision when making judgments or decisions. As a common psychological phenomenon, Decision-making Confidence may be a fundamental and ubiquitous component of decision-making process. Psychologists proposed that decision confidence serves as a link, which provides a graded scale that allows us to translate our subjective beliefs into suitable actions, resulting in different decisions in individuals in the objective physical world. Simultaneously, Decision Confidence affects a series of cognitive function after decisions in turn:how to learn and improve subsequent actions depended on previous decisions, and demonstrate our optimal choice to others, and so on.Little is known about the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying Decision Confidence, despite some behavior and neural mechanisms studies have been done. Therefore, adopting the fMRI measures, the present study based on the two dimensions of "automatic or controlled" and "single or post", using the newly developed post-decision wagering task and the decision-making and decision-making confidence estimates task to investigate the cognitive and neural mechanism underlying the processing of decision-making confidence, as well as the the cognitive regulation role of Decision-making confidence to the Decision processing, respectively under the modes of automatic processing (ExperimentⅠ)and controlled processing (ExperimentⅡ) in the uncertain situation.Experiment I:the decision-making conditions were manipulated in the Experiment I (forced DO; optional DO & PASS), the results have showed that:(1) the decision accuracy had a signify cantly increase than the forced choice condition, while the performance of reaction time did not show significant differences between them, which indicated that priming the automatic confidence estimates positively, affected the decision making. With the prolonged stimulus duration, the rate of PASS significantly decreased, while there was no significantly increase in decision accuracy in which PASS option was shown, indicating the obvious overconfidence phenomenon; (2) the cerebral regions activated specfic to the processing of the decision-making confidence (the optional direction decision minus the forced direction decision) mainly include left superior parietal lobule(BA7), left/ right anterior cingulate gyrus(BA32), right prefrontal gyrus(BA9), left precentral gyrus (BA7), left cingulate gyrus(BA23), and all these activations were positive; within regions of interest of left superior parietal lobule(BA7) and left anterior cingulate gyrus(BA32), there is a significant positive linear correlation between the left superior parietal lobule(BA7) and the behavioral results of the rate of PASS(r2=0.58,p<0.001).ExperimentⅡ, in which two decision forms were manipulated, whether rendering confidence estimates or not, the results have showed that (1) the requirement of confidence estimates was found to obviously increase decisional response times than the non-estimations in all varying difficult conditions.comitantly, decisional accuracy had significant increases required estimating confidence especially there was most increase in the most difficult condition. (2)the cerebral regions activated specfic to the processing of the decision-making confidence (the confidence estimates minus the press key reactions) mainly include left cingulate gyrus(BA32), left inferior frontal gyrus(BA44), the bilateral caudate and the bilateral inferior occipital (BA18), and all these activations were positive.Based on the present study results which included ExperimentⅠand ExperimentⅡ, we can conclude that:(1) regardless of the automatic or controlled processing, the priming the confidence estimates positively affected the decision making; the automatic processing confidence and decision-making might be the same parallel processing, did not occupied the cognitive resource which belongs to the single-process theories and automatic processing, the controlled processing confidence occupied the cognitive resource which was the controlled processing. (2) The cerebral activation data on left superior parietal lobule (BA7) fit well with the behavioral data, indicating the important region involved in the automatic processing of decision-making confidence, simultaneously, the left cingulate gyrus(BA32) and left inferior frontal gyrus(BA44) involved in the controlled estimates of decision-making confidence.

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