Consciousness, (meta)cognition, and culture.

Our conscious experience is determined by a combination of top-down processes (e.g., prior beliefs) and bottom-up processes (e.g., sensations). The balance between these two processes depends on estimates of their reliability (precision), so that the estimate considered more reliable is given more weight. We can modify these estimates at the metacognitive level, changing the relative weights of priors and sensations. This enables us, for example, to direct our attention to weak stimuli. But there is a cost to this malleability. For example, excessive weighting of top-down processes, as in schizophrenia, can lead to perceiving things that are not there and believing things that are not true. It is only at the top of the brain's cognitive hierarchy that metacognitive control becomes conscious. At this level, our beliefs concern complex, abstract entities with which we have limited direct experience. Estimates of the precision of such beliefs are more uncertain and more malleable. However, at this level, we do not need to rely on our own limited experience. We can rely instead on the experiences of others. Explicit metacognition plays a unique role, enabling us to share our experiences. We acquire our beliefs about the world from our immediate social group and from our wider culture. And the same sources provide us with better estimates of the precision of these beliefs. Our confidence in our high-level beliefs is heavily influenced by culture at the expense of direct experience.

The mystery of the brain-culture interface.

Nature and culture work together to shape who we are. We are embedded in culture and are profoundly influenced by what those around us say and do. The interface between minds occurs at the level of explicit metacognition, which is at the top of our brain's control hierarchy. But how do our brains do this?

Animacy and the prediction of behaviour.

To survive, all animals need to predict what other agents are going to do next. We review neural mechanisms involved in the steps required for this ability. The first step is to determine whether an object is an agent, and if so, how sophisticated it is. This involves brain regions carrying representations of animate agents. The movements of the agent can then be anticipated in the short term based solely on physical constraints. In the longer term, taking into account the agent's goals and intentions is useful. Observing goal directed behaviour activates the neural action observation network, and predicting future goal directed behaviour is helped by the observer's own action generating mechanisms. Intentions are critically important in determining actions when interacting with other agents, as several intentions can lie behind an action. Here, interpretation is helped by prior beliefs about the agent and the brain's mentalising system is engaged. Biologically-constrained computational models of action recognition exist, but equivalent models for understanding intentional agents remain to be developed.

Precision and the Bayesian brain.

Scientific thinking about the minds of humans and other animals has been transformed by the idea that the brain is Bayesian. A cornerstone of this idea is that agents set the balance between prior knowledge and incoming evidence based on how reliable or 'precise' these different sources of information are - lending the most weight to that which is most reliable. This concept of precision has crept into several branches of cognitive science and is a lynchpin of emerging ideas in computational psychiatry - where unusual beliefs or experiences are explained as abnormalities in how the brain estimates precision. But what precisely is precision? In this Primer we explain how precision has found its way into classic and contemporary models of perception, learning, self-awareness, and social interaction. We also chart how ideas around precision are beginning to change in radical ways, meaning we must get more precise about how precision works.

Helping the waiter to hold his tray: Rigid haptic linkage promotes inter-personal motor coordination.

When a glass is lifted from a tray, there is a challenge for the waiter. He must quickly compensate for the reduction in the weight of the tray to keep it balanced. This compensation is easily achieved if the waiter lifts the glass himself. Because he has, himself, initiated the action, he can predict the timing and the magnitude of the perturbation of the tray and respond (via the holding hand) accordingly. In this study, we examined coordination when either one or two people hold the tray while either one of them or a third person removes the glass. Our results show that there is exquisite coordination between the two people holding the tray. We suggest that this coordination depends upon the haptic link provided by the rigid platform that both people are holding. We conclude that the guest at a reception should not lift his drink from the waiter's tray until they have the waiter's attention but, if too thirsty to wait, should lend a hand holding the tray.

The neural basis of consciousness.

Consciousness has evolved and is a feature of all animals with sufficiently complex nervous systems. It is, therefore, primarily a problem for biology, rather than physics. In this review, I will consider three aspects of consciousness: level of consciousness, whether we are awake or in a coma; the contents of consciousness, what determines how a small amount of sensory information is associated with subjective experience, while the rest is not; and meta-consciousness, the ability to reflect upon our subjective experiences and, importantly, to share them with others. I will discuss and compare current theories of the neural and cognitive mechanisms involved in producing these three aspects of consciousness and conclude that the research in this area is flourishing and has already succeeded to delineate these mechanisms in surprising detail.

Pandemics and the great evolutionary mismatch.

Dezecache et al. argue that affiliation and contact-seeking are key responses to danger. These natural social tendencies are likely to hinder the observance of physical distancing during the current pandemic. We need internet access at this time, not only to promote freedom of expression, but also to promote public health.

I haven't a clue! Expectations based on repetitions and hints facilitate perceptual experience of ambiguous images.

In recent years, the role of top-down expectations on perception has been extensively researched within the framework of predictive coding. However, less attention has been given to the different sources of expectations, how they differ, and how they interact. In this article, we examined the effects of informative hints on perceptual experience and how these interact with repetition-based expectations to create a long-lasting effect. Over 7 experiments, we used verbal hints and multiple presentations of ambiguous 2-tone images. We found that vividness ratings increased from 1 presentation to the next, even after the object in the image had been identified. In addition, vividness ratings significantly increased when images were introduced with a hint, and this boost was greater for more detailed hints. However, the initial increase in vividness did not always carry over to the next presentation. When recognition of the image in the presentation was hard because of memory load, inconsistent presentation, or noise level of the image, the initial advantage in vividness was attenuated. This was most apparent when participants were primed with a grayscale version of the 2-tone image. A computational model based on evidence accumulation was able to recover these patterns of perceptual experience, suggesting that the effect of hints is short lived if it cannot be encoded in memory for future presentations. This notion highlights the different contributions of attention, memory, and their interactions on forming expectations for perception. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

The Global Workspace Needs Metacognition.

The two leading cognitive accounts of consciousness currently available concern global workspace (a form of working memory) and metacognition. There is relatively little interaction between these two approaches and it has even been suggested that the two accounts are rival and separable alternatives. Here, we argue that the successful function of a global workspace critically requires that the broadcast representations include a metacognitive component.

Learning rapidly about the relevance of visual cues requires conscious awareness.

Humans have been shown to be capable of performing many cognitive tasks using information of which they are not consciously aware. This raises questions about what role consciousness actually plays in cognition. Here, we explored whether participants can learn cue-target contingencies in an attentional learning task when the cues were presented below the level of conscious awareness and how this differs from learning about conscious cues. Participants' manual (Experiment 1) and saccadic (Experiment 2) response speeds were influenced by both conscious and unconscious cues. However, participants were only able to adapt to reversals of the cue-target contingencies (Experiment 1) or changes in the reliability of the cues (Experiment 2) when consciously aware of the cues. Therefore, although visual cues can be processed unconsciously, learning about cues over a few trials requires conscious awareness of them. Finally, we discuss implications for cognitive theories of consciousness.

Volition and the Brain - Revisiting a Classic Experimental Study.

In 1983 Libet et al. demonstrated that brain activity associated with a voluntary act precedes conscious experience of the intention to act by several hundred milliseconds. The implication that it is the brain, rather than 'free will', that initiates voluntary acts has been discussed ever since by philosophers and lawyers, as well as by scientists. We show here how Libet's original study gave rise to an entire research field of experimental investigations of volition.

Neural computations underpinning the strategic management of influence in advice giving.

Research on social influence has focused mainly on the target of influence (e.g., consumer and voter); thus, the cognitive and neurobiological underpinnings of the source of the influence (e.g., politicians and salesmen) remain unknown. Here, in a three-sided advice-giving game, two advisers competed to influence a client by modulating their own confidence in their advice about which lottery the client should choose. We report that advisers' strategy depends on their level of influence on the client and their merit relative to one another. Moreover, blood-oxygenation-level-dependent (BOLD) signal in the temporo-parietal junction is modulated by adviser's current level of influence on the client, and relative merit prediction error affects activity in medial-prefrontal cortex. Both types of social information modulate ventral striatum response. By demonstrating what happens in our mind and brain when we try to influence others, these results begin to explain the biological mechanisms that shape inter-individual differences in social conduct.

Making better decisions in groups.

We review the literature to identify common problems of decision-making in individuals and groups. We are guided by a Bayesian framework to explain the interplay between past experience and new evidence, and the problem of exploring the space of hypotheses about all the possible states that the world could be in and all the possible actions that one could take. There are strong biases, hidden from awareness, that enter into these psychological processes. While biases increase the efficiency of information processing, they often do not lead to the most appropriate action. We highlight the advantages of group decision-making in overcoming biases and searching the hypothesis space for good models of the world and good solutions to problems. Diversity of group members can facilitate these achievements, but diverse groups also face their own problems. We discuss means of managing these pitfalls and make some recommendations on how to make better group decisions.

Anatomical Modularity of Verbal Working Memory? Functional Anatomical Evidence from a Famous Patient with Short-Term Memory Deficits.

Cognitive skills are the emergent property of distributed neural networks. The distributed nature of these networks does not necessarily imply a lack of specialization of the individual brain structures involved. However, it remains questionable whether discrete aspects of high-level behavior might be the result of localized brain activity of individual nodes within such networks. The phonological loop of working memory, with its simplicity, seems ideally suited for testing this possibility. Central to the development of the phonological loop model has been the description of patients with focal lesions and specific deficits. As much as the detailed description of their behavior has served to refine the phonological loop model, a classical anatomoclinical correlation approach with such cases falls short in telling whether the observed behavior is based on the functions of a neural system resembling that seen in normal subjects challenged with phonological loop tasks or whether different systems have taken over. This is a crucial issue for the cross correlation of normal cognition, normal physiology, and cognitive neuropsychology. Here we describe the functional anatomical patterns of JB, a historical patient originally described by Warrington et al. (1971), a patient with a left temporo-parietal lesion and selective short phonological store deficit. JB was studied with the H215O PET activation technique during a rhyming task, which primarily depends on the rehearsal system of the phonological loop. No residual function was observed in the left temporo-parietal junction, a region previously associated with the phonological buffer of working memory. However, Broca's area, the major counterpart of the rehearsal system, was the major site of activation during the rhyming task. Specific and autonomous activation of Broca's area in the absence of afferent inputs from the other major anatomical component of the phonological loop shows that a certain degree of functional independence or modularity exists in this distributed anatomical-cognitive system.

Independent Neural Computation of Value from Other People's Confidence.

Expectation of reward can be shaped by the observation of actions and expressions of other people in one's environment. A person's apparent confidence in the likely reward of an action, for instance, makes qualities of their evidence, not observed directly, socially accessible. This strategy is computationally distinguished from associative learning methods that rely on direct observation, by its use of inference from indirect evidence. In twenty-three healthy human subjects, we isolated effects of first-hand experience, other people's choices, and the mediating effect of their confidence, on decision-making and neural correlates of value within ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). Value derived from first-hand experience and other people's choices (regardless of confidence) were indiscriminately represented across vmPFC. However, value computed from agent choices weighted by their associated confidence was represented with specificity for ventromedial area 10. This pattern corresponds to shifts of connectivity and overlapping cognitive processes along a posterior-anterior vmPFC axis. Task behavior and self-reported self-reliance for decision-making in other social contexts correlated. The tendency to conform in other social contexts corresponded to increased activation in cortical regions previously shown to respond to social conflict in proportion to subsequent conformity (Campbell-Meiklejohn et al., 2010). The tendency to self-monitor predicted a selectively enhanced response to accordance with others in the right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ). The findings anatomically decompose vmPFC value representations according to computational requirements and provide biological insight into the social transmission of preference and reassurance gained from the confidence of others. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT: Decades of research have provided evidence that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) signals the satisfaction we expect from imminent actions. However, we have a surprisingly modest understanding of the organization of value across this substantial and varied region. This study finds that using cues of the reliability of other peoples' knowledge to enhance expectation of personal success generates value correlates that are anatomically distinct from those concurrently computed from direct, personal experience. This suggests that representation of decision values in vmPFC is suborganized according to the underlying computation, consistent with what we know about the anatomical heterogeneity of the region. These results also provide insight into the observational learning process by which someone else's confidence can sway and reassure our choices.

Mirroring and beyond: coupled dynamics as a generalized framework for modelling social interactions.

When people observe one another, behavioural alignment can be detected at many levels, from the physical to the mental. Likewise, when people process the same highly complex stimulus sequences, such as films and stories, alignment is detected in the elicited brain activity. In early sensory areas, shared neural patterns are coupled to the low-level properties of the stimulus (shape, motion, volume, etc.), while in high-order brain areas, shared neural patterns are coupled to high-levels aspects of the stimulus, such as meaning. Successful social interactions require such alignments (both behavioural and neural), as communication cannot occur without shared understanding. However, we need to go beyond simple, symmetric (mirror) alignment once we start interacting. Interactions are dynamic processes, which involve continuous mutual adaptation, development of complementary behaviour and division of labour such as leader-follower roles. Here, we argue that interacting individuals are dynamically coupled rather than simply aligned. This broader framework for understanding interactions can encompass both processes by which behaviour and brain activity mirror each other (neural alignment), and situations in which behaviour and brain activity in one participant are coupled (but not mirrored) to the dynamics in the other participant. To apply these more sophisticated accounts of social interactions to the study of the underlying neural processes we need to develop new experimental paradigms and novel methods of data analysis.

Dual-process theories and consciousness: the case for 'Type Zero' cognition.

A step towards a theory of consciousness would be to characterize the effect of consciousness on information processing. One set of results suggests that the effect of consciousness is to interfere with computations that are optimally performed non-consciously. Another set of results suggests that conscious, system 2 processing is the home of norm-compliant computation. This is contrasted with system 1 processing, thought to be typically unconscious, which operates with useful but error-prone heuristics. These results can be reconciled by separating out two different distinctions: between conscious and non-conscious representations, on the one hand, and between automatic and deliberate processes, on the other. This pair of distinctions is used to illuminate some existing experimental results and to resolve the puzzle about whether consciousness helps or hinders accurate information processing. This way of resolving the puzzle shows the importance of another category, which we label 'type 0 cognition', characterized by automatic computational processes operating on non-conscious representations.

Equality bias impairs collective decision-making across cultures.

We tend to think that everyone deserves an equal say in a debate. This seemingly innocuous assumption can be damaging when we make decisions together as part of a group. To make optimal decisions, group members should weight their differing opinions according to how competent they are relative to one another; whenever they differ in competence, an equal weighting is suboptimal. Here, we asked how people deal with individual differences in competence in the context of a collective perceptual decision-making task. We developed a metric for estimating how participants weight their partner's opinion relative to their own and compared this weighting to an optimal benchmark. Replicated across three countries (Denmark, Iran, and China), we show that participants assigned nearly equal weights to each other's opinions regardless of true differences in their competence-even when informed by explicit feedback about their competence gap or under monetary incentives to maximize collective accuracy. This equality bias, whereby people behave as if they are as good or as bad as their partner, is particularly costly for a group when a competence gap separates its members.

Interplay Between Conceptual Expectations and Movement Predictions Underlies Action Understanding.

Recent accounts of understanding goal-directed action underline the importance of a hierarchical predictive architecture. However, the neural implementation of such an architecture remains elusive. In the present study, we used functional neuroimaging to quantify brain activity associated with predicting physical movements, as they were modulated by conceptual-expectations regarding the purpose of the object involved in the action. Participants observed object-related actions preceded by a cue that generated both conceptual goal expectations and movement goal predictions. In 2 tasks, observers judged whether conceptual or movement goals matched or mismatched the cue. At the conceptual level, expected goals specifically recruited the posterior cingulate cortex, irrespectively of the task and the perceived movement goal. At the movement level, neural activation of the parieto-frontal circuit, including inferior frontal gyrus and the inferior parietal lobe, reflected unpredicted movement goals. Crucially, this movement prediction error was only present when the purpose of the involved object was expected. These findings provide neural evidence that prior conceptual expectations influence processing of physical movement goals and thereby support the hierarchical predictive account of action processing.