MetaChange · A decision within a decision: Exploring the psychological, electrophysiological and computational mechanisms underlying changes of mind and metacognitive judgements.

A decision within a decision: Exploring the psychological, electrophysiological and computational mechanisms underlying changes of mind and metacognitive judgements.

Making and evaluating decisions is one of the most fundamental cognitive processes of humans and other animals. Indeed, we almost constantly make decisions in our everyday lives, with potentially dramatic consequences if we are not correctly able to quickly evaluate or alter a given decision. In this context, MetaChange's aim is to understand how humans are able to integrate sensory information to inform a decision, even after the decision has been made. This question arises from an increasing interest in our ability to evaluate a decision even in the absence of explicit feedback, as well as our ability to alter an ongoing decision based on additional internal or external new information. Thus, the general objective of MetaChange is to understand how these metacognitive abilities are impacted by the availability of post-decisional information, that is information relevant to the task but available only after an initial decision has been made. The specific objectives of MetaChange are first to understand the impact of post-decisional information at the behavioural level, second to harness invasive electroencephalography to unravel the underlying neuronal processes, and third to build a computational model of these decisional and metacognitive processes to provide a unifying framework to understand our behavioural and electrophysiological results. As such, it is meant to be the first full characterization of decisional and post-decisional processes combining these three approaches and will help us to better understand how the human brain explores the world.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union