ArticleNature communications2023
Neural and computational underpinnings of biased confidence in human reinforcement learning.
Article in Nature communications, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed, 17 citations in OpenAlex.
- Deciding for others alters metacognition leading to responsibility aversion.Science advances · 2026Article
- Neurocomputational modeling of rule abstraction and memorization during probabilistic stimulus-reward learning.iScience · 2026Article
- Brain stimulation over dorsomedial prefrontal cortex causally affects metacognitive bias but not mentalising.Cognitive, affective & behavioral neuroscience · 2025Article
- Behavioral and computational signatures of reinforcement learning and confidence biases in gambling disorder.Journal of behavioral addictions · 2025Article
- Article
- From conformity to loss of control: psychological mechanisms in Suárez's biting incidents and the development of the SDA model.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Navigating Uncertainty: The Role of Mood and Confidence in Decision-Making Flexibility and Performance.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Direct stimulation of anterior insula and ventromedial prefrontal cortex disrupts economic choices.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Value Estimation versus Effort Mobilization: A General Dissociation between Ventromedial and Dorsomedial Prefrontal Cortex.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Article
- The neural representation of metacognition in preferential decision-making.Human brain mapping · 2024Article
- Learning and metacognition under volatility in GD: Lower learning rates and distorted coupling between action and confidence.Journal of behavioral addictions · 2024Article
- Active reinforcement learning versus action bias and hysteresis: control with a mixture of experts and nonexperts.PLoS computational biology · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors at 4 institutions in 4 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
While navigating a fundamentally uncertain world, humans and animals constantly evaluate the probability of their decisions, actions or statements being correct. When explicitly elicited, these confidence estimates typically correlates positively with neural activity in a ventromedial-prefrontal (VMPFC) network and negatively in a dorsolateral and dorsomedial prefrontal network. Here, combining fMRI with a reinforcement-learning paradigm, we leverage the fact that humans are more confident in their choices when seeking gains than avoiding losses to reveal a functional dissociation: whereas the dorsal prefrontal network correlates negatively with a condition-specific confidence signal, the VMPFC network positively encodes task-wide confidence signal incorporating the valence-induced bias. Challenging dominant neuro-computational models, we found that decision-related VMPFC activity better correlates with confidence than with option-values inferred from reinforcement-learning models. Altogether, these results identify the VMPFC as a key node in the neuro-computational architecture that builds global feeling-of-confidence signals from latent decision variables and contextual biases during reinforcement-learning.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.