Speaker
Description
Introduction:
Despite advances in imaging and lesion studies, the neural underpinnings of metacognition, i.e., the ability to evaluate and regulate one’s own cognitive processes, remain poorly understood. Given its involvement in reward processing, error detection, and self-monitoring, the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) has been proposed as a potential substrate for metacognitive processing. Hence, this study investigates the role of the OFC in metacognitive sensitivity using a transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) approach.
Methods:
Twenty participants completed two sessions in a double-blind, within-subject design. Each session involved tDCS (anodal or sham) over the left OFC while participants performed a two-alternative forced-choice task with the addition of confidence ratings. Prior to stimulation, subjects also completed the Metacognitions Questionnaire–30 and a delay discounting task. Order of stimulation was counterbalanced, and participants did not report sensory differences between conditions.
Results:
Anodal stimulation significantly reduced metacognitive sensitivity without affecting perceptual decision-making accuracy and increased mean confidence ratings. Correlation analysis showed that metacognitive sensitivity under real stimulation was associated with negative beliefs about thinking. No significant correlation was found between metacognitive sensitivity and delay discounting under either stimulation condition.
Conclusions:
Findings support the involvement of the OFC in second-order retrospective judgments rather than perceptual decision-making accuracy. These results suggest that OFC overactivation may impair one’s ability to assess the reliability of their own thoughts, with implications for psychiatric conditions such as obsessive-compulsive disorder. However, due to limitations including a small sample size and the custom-made task design, future studies should expand on the neural networks underlying metacognition.
| If you're submitting a symposium talk, what's the symposium title? | Verso un approccio transdiagnostico: integrazione tra psicologia sperimentale, neuroscienze e pratica clinica nello studio della psicopatologia |
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| If you're submitting a symposium, or a talk that is part of a symposium, is this a junior symposium? | No |
