Elisa Filevich

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin | HU Berlin · Department of Psychology

We studied the role of movement and outcome information in forming metacognitive representations of agency. Participants completed a goal-oriented task, a virtual version of a ball-throwing game. In two conditions, we manipulated either the visual representation of the throwing movement or its distal outcome (the resulting ball flight/trajectory)....

Despite the ubiquitous presence of tactile information in our daily activities, studies of how we experience agency of our actions have rarely relied on manipulated visuo-tactile feedback. Instead, what is often manipulated are the distal (and arbitrarily associated) consequences of our actions. The few studies that did investigate whether tactile...

Within a Bayesian framework, both our perceptual decisions and confidence about those decisions are based on the precision-weighted integration of prior expectations and incoming sensory information. This assumes priors to influence both decisions and confidence in the same way. Against this assumption, asymmetries have been found in the influence...

We compared the contribution of tactile information to other sources of information in our representations of agency. Participants (N = 40) reached with their right hand toward a ridged plate with a specific orientation and saw online feedback that could match or differ from their action in one of three ways: the physical plate’s orientation, the a...

According to Bayesian models, both decisions and confidence are based on the same precision-weighted integration of prior expectations (“priors”) and incoming information (“likelihoods”). This assumes that priors are integrated optimally and equally in decisions and confidence, which has not been tested. In three experiments, we quantify how priors...

The present study investigates the contribution of first-order accuracy and uncertainty to global performance monitoring. After a set of four trials of an orientation matching task, participants first reported their perceived mean response, and then a region around that mean estimate corresponding to their estimation of their responses’ dispersion....

We can monitor our intentional movements and form explicit representations about our movements, allowing us to describe how we move our bodies. But it is unclear which information this metacognitive monitoring relies on. For example, when throwing a ball to hit a target, we might use the visual information about how the ball flew to metacognitively...

Background: Motor symptoms in functional movement disorders (FMDs) are experienced as involuntary but share characteristics of voluntary action. Clinical and experimental evidence indicate alterations in monitoring, control, and subjective experience of self-performed movements. Objective: The objective of this study was to test the prediction t...

It is still debated whether metacognition, or the ability to monitor our own mental states, relies on processes that are “domain-general” (a single set of processes can account for the monitoring of any mental process) or “domain-specific” (metacognition is accomplished by a collection of multiple monitoring modules, one for each cognitive domain)....

According to Bayesian models, both decisions and confidence are based on the same precision-weighted integration of prior expectations ("priors") and incoming information ("likelihoods"). This assumes that priors are integrated optimally and equally in decisions and confidence, which has not been tested. In two experiments, we quantitatively assess...

As humans we communicate important information through fine nuances in our facial expressions, but because conscious motor representations are noisy, we might not be able to report these fine movements. Here we measured the precision of the explicit metacognitive information that young adults have about their own facial expressions. Participants im...

Despite the tangible progress in psychological and cognitive sciences over the last several years, these disciplines still trail other more mature sciences in identifying the most important questions that need to be solved. Reaching such consensus could lead to greater synergy across different laboratories, faster progress, and increased focus on s...

It is still debated whether metacognition, or the ability to monitor our own mental states, relies on mechanisms that are ‘domain-general’ (a single mechanism can account for the monitoring of any mental process) or ‘domain-specific’ (metacognition is accomplished by a collection of multiple monitoring modules, one for each cognitive domain). It ha...

We can monitor our intentional movements, in order to describe how we move our bodies. But it is unclear which information this metacognitive monitoring relies on. For example, when throwing a ball to hit a target, we might use the visual information about how the ball flew to metacognitively assess our performance. Alternatively, we might disregar...

Introduction Premonitory urges in Tourette disorder are often linked to altered somatosensory processing, which might include deficits in metacognition. We explored tactile and visual metacognitive ability in people with Tourette disorder and healthy control participants. Methods Patients with Tourrete disorder and healthy control participants com...

Metacognition is defined as the capacity to monitor and control one's own cognitive processes. Recently, Carpenter and colleagues (2019) reported that metacognitive performance can be improved through adaptive training: healthy participants performed a perceptual discrimination task, and subsequently indicated confidence in their response. Metacogn...

Acting in the world is accompanied by a sense of agency, or experience of control over our actions and their outcomes. As humans, we can report on this experience through judgments of agency. These judgments often occur under noisy conditions. We examined the computations underlying judgments of agency, in particular under the influence of sensory...

Objectives The effects of nature on physical and mental health are an emerging topic in empirical research with increasing influence on practical health recommendations. Here we set out to investigate the association between spending time outdoors and brain structural plasticity in conjunctions with self-reported affect. Methods We established the...

Judgments of agency, our sense of control over our actions and the environment, are often assumed to be metacognitive. We examined this assumption at the computational level by comparing the effects of sensory noise on agency judgments to those on confidence judgements, which are widely accepted to be metacognitive in nature. In two tasks, particip...

We can make exquisitely precise movements without the apparent need for conscious monitoring. But can we monitor the low-level movement parameters when prompted? And what are the mechanisms that allow us to monitor our movements? To answer these questions, we designed a semivirtual ball throwing task. On each trial, participants first threw a virtu...

Despite the tangible progress in psychological and cognitive sciences over the last several years, the discipline still trails other more mature sciences in identifying the most important questions that need to be solved. Reaching such consensus could lead to greater synergy across disciplines, faster progress, and increased focus on solving import...

As humans we communicate important information through fine nuances in our facial expressions, but because conscious motor representations are noisy, we might not be able to report these fine but meaningful movements. Here we measured how much explicit metacognitive information young adults have about their own facial expressions. Participants imit...

We can make exquisitely precise movements without the apparent need for conscious monitoring. But can we monitor the low-level movement parameters when prompted? And what are the mechanisms that allow us to monitor our movements? To answer these questions, we designed a semi-virtual ball throwing task. On each trial, participants first threw a virt...

Confidence judgments are a central tool in metacognition research. In a typical task, participants first perform perceptual (first-order) decisions and then rate their confidence in these decisions. The relationship between confidence and first-order accuracy is taken as a measure of metacognitive performance. Confidence is often assumed to stem fr...

Understanding how people rate their confidence is critical for the characterization of a wide range of perceptual, memory, motor and cognitive processes. To enable the continued exploration of these processes, we created a large database of confidence studies spanning a broad set of paradigms, participant populations and fields of study. The data f...

Metacognition plays a pivotal role in human development. The ability to realize that we do not know something, or meta-ignorance, emerges after approximately five years of age. We sought for the brain systems that underlie the developmental emergence of this ability in a preschool sample. Twenty-four children aged between five and six years answere...

Metacognition plays a pivotal role in human development. The ability to realize that we do not know something, or meta-ignorance, emerges after approximately five years of age. We sought for the brain systems that underlie the developmental emergence of this ability in a preschool sample. Twenty-four children aged between five and six years answere...

Confidence judgements are a central tool for research in metacognition. In a typical task, participants first perform perceptual (first-order) decisions and then rate their confidence in these decisions. The relationship between confidence and first-order accuracy is taken as measure of metacognitive performance. Confidence is often assumed to stem...

Understanding how people rate their confidence is critical for characterizing a wide range of perceptual, memory, motor, and cognitive processes. However, progress has been slowed by the difficulty of collecting new data and the unavailability of existing data. To address this issue, we created a large database of confidence studies spanning a broa...

Adequate reliability of measurement is a precondition for investigating individual differences and age-related changes in brain structure. One approach to improve reliability is to identify and control for variables that are predictive of within-person variance. To this end, we applied both classical statistical methods and machine-learning-inspire...

Humans can exploit recognition memory as a simple cue for judgment. The utility of recognition depends on the interplay with the environment, particularly on its predictive power (validity) in a domain. It is, therefore, an important question whether people are sensitive to differences in recognition validity between domains. Strategic, intra-indiv...

Research Highlights [1] Children develop the ability to report that they do not know something at around five years of age. [2] Children who could correctly report their own ignorance in a partial-knowledge task showed thicker cortices within medial orbitofrontal cortex. [3] This region was functionally connected to parts of the default-mode networ...

Human metacognition, or the capacity to introspect on one's own mental states, has been mostly characterized through confidence reports in visual tasks. A pressing question is to what extent results from visual studies generalize to other domains. Answering this question allows determining whether metacognition operates through shared, supramodal m...

Background Most studies of brain structure and function, and their relationships to cognitive ability, have relied on inter-individual variability in magnetic resonance (MR) images. Intra-individual variability is often ignored or implicitly assumed to be equivalent to the former. Testing this assumption empirically by collecting enough data on sin...

Ambiguous images such as Rubin’s vase-face can be interpreted in at least two different ways. These interpretations are typically taken to be mutually exclusive, and ambiguous images have thus served as models of perceptual competition. Here, we present data that challenges this view. In an online survey, we found that a large proportion of people...

Metacognition, or the capacity to introspect on one's own mental states, has been mostly characterized through confidence reports in visual tasks. A pressing question is to what extent the results from visual studies generalize to other domains. Answering this question allows determining whether metacognition operates through shared, domain-general...

The functional architecture of spontaneous BOLD fluctuations has been characterized in detail by numerous studies, demonstrating its potential relevance as a biomarker. However, the systematic investigation of its consistency is still in its infancy. Here, we analyze both the within- and between-subject variability as well as the test-retest reliab...

We present here "Just Another Tool for Online Studies" (JATOS): an open source, cross-platform web application with a graphical user interface (GUI) that greatly simplifies setting up and communicating with a web server to host online studies that are written in JavaScript. JATOS is easy to install in all three major platforms (Microsoft Windows, M...

Lucid dreaming is a state of awareness that one is dreaming, without leaving the sleep state. Dream reports show that self-reflection and volitional control are more pronounced in lucid compared with nonlucid dreams. Mostly on these grounds, lucid dreaming has been associated with metacognition. However, the link to lucid dreaming at the neural lev...

Agency refers to an individual’s capacity to initiate and perform actions, and thus to bring about change, both in their own state, and in the state of the outside world. The importance of agency in human life cannot be understated. Social responsibility is built on the principle that there are “facts” of agency, on which individuals can generally...

The subjective feeling of free choice is an important feature of human experience. Experimental tasks have typically studied free choice by contrasting free and instructed selection of response alternatives. These tasks have been criticised, and it remains unclear how they relate to the subjective feeling of freely choosing. We replicated previous...

We have investigated a situation in which externally available response alternatives and their internal representations could be dissociated, by suddenly removing some action alternatives from the response space during the interval between the free selection and the execution of a voluntary action. Choice reaction times in this situation were relat...

Action decisions can be directly driven by the current state of the external environment (instructed decisions); or they can be driven by internal mental states and goals, independently of the current environment (intentional decisions). Neural, behavioural and subjective data suggests that two separate neural systems may drive instructed and inten...

Inhibition of prepotent action is an important aspect of self-control, particularly in social contexts. Action inhibition and its neural bases have been extensively studied. However, the neural precursors of free decisions to inhibit have hardly been studied. We asked participants to freely choose to either make a rapid key press in response to a v...

This file contains supporting figures, S1 and S2, and table S1. (DOCX)

This file contains supporting figures, S3 to S16, representing individual distributions of RTs. (DOCX)

Action inhibition is an important part of everyday human behaviour. Most previous studies of action inhibition have focussed on stop-signals. Here, we consider the case where participants themselves decide to inhibit, or not inhibit, a prepotent action. Participants received electric stimulation that elicited an itchy feeling on the wrist. If they...

Electrical stimulation of the human cortex typically elicits positive sensorimotor effects. However, many neurosurgical studies have also reported negative motor areas (NMAs) in which stimulation produces inhibition of ongoing movement. The neurocognitive implications of these studies have not been systematically explored. Here we review the neuros...