Jintao Xing (KU Leuven)
The Metacognitive Conflict Between Internal Feedback and External Feedback: Cognitive, Neural and Computational Mechanisms
get in touch: jintao.xing (at) kuleuven (.) be

Confidence refers to a subjective feeling reflecting the accuracy of people’s answers when they complete a task. Researchers often use confidence reports to assess the effectiveness of metacognitive monitoring. In addition to this internal self-assessment, people often also get external assessments like feedback about their performance. However, in the real world, external feedback is not always perfectly contingent on accuracy. The efficacy of external feedback can vary from being entirely determined by accuracy on the one hand, versus being completely random at the other extreme. Low efficacious external feedback provides only limited information about decision accuracy and might conflict with the internal sense of confidence that people naturally compute.  At current, there is little experimental insight regarding how this metacognitive conflict influences the subsequent confidence report or behavioral response. I will address fundamental mechanisms underlying these important questions, at cognitive, computational, and neural levels.