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Poster C in Poster Session C: Wednesday, August 5, 9:30 – 11:15 am, Kimmel Center, Shorin & Rosenthal Rooms

Domian-Specific Stimulus Coding and Domain-General Confidence Signals Across Cognitive Tasks

Xun Chen¹, Xiao Hu¹; ¹Beijing Normal University

Presenter: Xun Chen

How the brain transforms uncertainty into subjective confidence is a central question in metacognition. Confidence depends on at least two sources of information: stimulus uncertainty, reflecting the reliability of stimulus evidence, and decision uncertainty, reflecting how close an internal representation is to a choice boundary. Yet it remains unclear whether these cues are processed by shared neural systems across tasks or by task-specific mechanisms. Using fMRI, we examined three tasks—random dot motion, visual short-term memory, and numerical comparison—that independently manipulated these two uncertainty sources. Across tasks, confidence showed a similar interaction between stimulus and decision uncertainty, indicating a common pattern of cue integration. fMRI results further revealed task-specific effects of stimulus uncertainty, whereas decision uncertainty and interaction-related contrasts showed shared activations across tasks. These findings suggest domain-specific coding of stimulus uncertainty but domain-general networks for confidence evaluation and uncertainty-related action control.

Topic Area: Decision-Making, Cognitive Control & Event Cognition