Action information contributes to metacognitive decision-making

Abstract Monitoring and control of our decision process are key ingredients of adept decision-making. Such metacognitive abilities allow us to adjust ongoing behavior and modify future decisions in the absence of external feedback. Although metacognition is critical in many daily life settings, it remains unclear what information is actually being monitored and what kind of information is being used for metacognitive decisions. In the present study, we investigated whether response information connected to perceptual events contribute to metacognitive decision-making. Therefore, we recorded EEG signals during a perceptual color discrimination task while participants were asked to provide an estimate about the quality of their decision on each trial. Critically, the moment participants provided second-order decisions varied across conditions, thereby changing the amount of action information (e.g., response competition or response fluency) available for metacognitive decisions. Results from three experiments demonstrate that metacognitive performance improved when first-order action information was available at the moment metacognitive decisions about the perceptual task had to be provided. This behavioral effect was accompanied by enhanced functional connectivity (beta phase synchrony) between motor areas and prefrontal regions, exclusively observed during metacognitive decision-making. Our findings demonstrate that action information contributes to metacognitive decision-making, thereby painting a picture of metacognition as a second-order process, integrating sensory evidence and the state of the decider during decision-making. Significance Monitoring and control of our decision process is a critical part of every day decision-making. When feedback is not available, metacognitive skills enable us to modify current behavior and adapt prospective decision-making. Here, we investigated what kind information is being used to compute an estimate about the quality of our decisions. Results demonstrate that during perceptual decision-making, information about one’s actions towards perceptual events is being used to evaluate the quality of one’s decisions. EEG results indicate that functional connectivity between motor regions and prefrontal cortex could serve as a mechanism to convey action information during metacognitive decision-making. Considered together, our results demonstrate that post-decisional information contributes to metacognition, thereby evaluating not only what one perceives (e.g., strength of perceptual evidence) but also how one responds towards perceptual events.