Learning to trust our senses

学会相信我们的感官

• 批准号: 2605469
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Goldsmiths University of London
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Studentship
• 财政年份: 2021
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2021 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=studentship-2605469
• 关键词: Learning; trust; our; senses

To effectively interact with the environment we must estimate the reliability or precision of what we can perceive. For example, if we are looking for our dog in the park on a dark night, we may have low confidence in the precision of visual signals and therefore rely on other senses (e.g., hearing) or deploy other strategies to gain more information. This online assessment of confidence in our senses depends on metacognitive monitoring mechanisms in the brain which are thought to be influenced by contextual information (Deroy, Spence, & Noppeney, 2016; Pereira et al., 2020). While many scientists assume we do generate these kinds of 'beliefs about precision', it remains unclear whether this is the case and how confidence in our senses is encoded in the brain. Ageing adults tend to make poorer decisions based on sensory signals and preliminary evidence suggests that perceptual metacognition also declines with age This raises the possibility that poor decision-making could be explained by our inaccurate beliefs about the precision of our senses. Establishing the fundamental cognitive and neural mechanisms of perceptual metacognition holds promise for understanding suboptimal beliefs and behaviour, especially those seen in older adults.This PhD project will use a multi-method approach to characterise the cognitive and neural mechanisms that underpin meta-level beliefs about the reliability of our senses and will investigate how these mechanisms change as we age. Firstly, we will test the hypothesis that observers form meta-level beliefs about perception, and that these beliefs bias perceptual confidence. By using a classic motion coherence task (Britten, Shadlen, Newsome, & Movhson, 1992) and state-of-the art psychophysical measures of perceptual and metacognitive performance (Maniscalco & Lau, 2012), we will test whether expectations about signal strength bias perceptual confidence (e.g., are observers biased to be more confident in their choices when they expect strong signals?). We will then test whether such biases in confidence translate to strategic changes in behaviour e.g., if participants are not confident in their decision will they seek more information to improve their choice? After investigating these fundamental mechanisms, we will use electroencephalography (EEG) to record electrical brain activity, applying state-of-the-art multivariate pattern decoding techniques to establish how signal strength is encoded in the brain and how these representations are shaped by metacognitive beliefs about signal strength. Participants will complete the same task while brain activity is recorded. First, analyses will establish whether objective signal strength is encoded in primary visual areas or 'higher' brain regions implicated in decision confidence. Once these regions are identified, we will ask whether pattern strength is altered by top-down expectations and will use the excellent temporal resolution of EEG to ask whether predictive biases emerge even before stimuli are presented. Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) experiments will then use non-invasive brain stimulation to test the causal contribution of these brain areas in the effects found in the preceding experiments.Finally, we will build on the mechanistic framework developed in these studies to explore how meta-level beliefs change across the lifespan by sampling a wide range of ages. This will identify any changes in these mechanisms that occur in healthy ageing, developing our understanding of how we monitor and rely on our senses as we age and how beliefs about the senses may go awry. Understanding these age-linked changes in perceptual metacognition and self-awareness is important for psychologists and has significant implications for the wider social sciences and public policy.

为了有效地与环境互动，我们必须估计我们所能感知的可靠性或精确性。例如，如果我们在一个漆黑的夜晚在公园里寻找我们的狗，我们可能对视觉信号的精确度信心不足，因此依赖于其他感官（例如，或部署其他策略来获取更多信息。这种对我们感官信心的在线评估取决于大脑中的元认知监测机制，这些机制被认为受到上下文信息的影响（Deroy，Spence，& Noppeney，2016;佩雷拉等人，2020年）。虽然许多科学家认为我们确实产生了这种“关于精确的信念”，但目前还不清楚情况是否如此，以及我们对感官的信心是如何在大脑中编码的。上了年纪的成年人往往会根据感官信号做出更糟糕的决定，初步证据表明，感知元认知也会随着年龄的增长而下降。这就提出了一种可能性，即糟糕的决策可以用我们对感官精确性的不准确信念来解释。建立感知元认知的基本认知和神经机制，为理解次优信念和行为，特别是老年人的信念和行为提供了希望。这个博士项目将使用多方法方法来验证认知和神经机制，这些机制支撑着关于我们感官可靠性的元水平信念，并将研究这些机制如何随着我们的年龄而变化。首先，我们将测试的假设，观察员形成元水平的信念，感知，这些信念偏见的知觉信心。通过使用经典的运动连贯性任务（Britten，Shadlen，Newsome，& Movhson，1992）和感知和元认知性能的最先进的心理物理测量（Maniscalco & Lau，2012），我们将测试对信号强度的期望是否会影响感知信心（例如，当观察者预期会有强烈的信号时，他们是否会对自己的选择更有信心？然后，我们将测试这种信心偏差是否会转化为行为的战略变化，例如，如果参与者对自己的决定没有信心，他们是否会寻求更多的信息来改善他们的选择？在研究了这些基本机制之后，我们将使用脑电图（EEG）来记录脑电活动，应用最先进的多元模式解码技术来确定信号强度如何在大脑中编码，以及这些表征如何通过元认知对信号强度的信念来塑造。参与者将完成相同的任务，同时记录大脑活动。首先，分析将确定客观信号强度是否编码在主要视觉区域或涉及决策信心的“高级”大脑区域。一旦识别出这些区域，我们将询问模式强度是否会被自上而下的预期所改变，并将使用EEG的出色时间分辨率来询问预测偏差是否会在刺激出现之前出现。经颅磁刺激（TMS）实验将使用非侵入性脑刺激来测试这些脑区在先前实验中发现的效应中的因果贡献。最后，我们将建立在这些研究中开发的机制框架上，通过对广泛的年龄范围进行采样，探索元水平信念在整个生命周期中的变化。这将确定这些机制在健康老龄化中发生的任何变化，发展我们对随着年龄增长我们如何监控和依赖我们的感官以及对感官的信念如何出错的理解。理解这些与年龄相关的感知元认知和自我意识的变化对心理学家来说很重要，对更广泛的社会科学和公共政策具有重要意义。