Yiran Ge¹, Siyuan Cheng¹, Yixue Zhao², Nihong Chen²; ¹Tsinghua University, ²South China Normal University

Decision confidence, a subjective estimate of the probability of being correct, enables individuals to evaluate their decisions and guide flexible behavior. Despite its pivotal role in metacognition, its neural basis remains unclear. To investigate the cortical hierarchy underlying confidence formation, we conducted an fMRI study using a perceptual decision task, in which subjects judged the motion direction and then provided confidence ratings. We first searched for brain regions that tracked subjects’ confidence. Whole-brain analyses revealed confidence-related signals in dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) and rostral prefrontal cortex (rPFC), both showing greater activation under low-confidence condition. Importantly, we uncovered distinct roles of dACC and rPFC in choice and confidence generation. dACC exhibited an interaction between task difficulty and response correctness, indicating its role of error monitoring during decision making. In contrast, confidence-related activity in rPFC predicted individual differences in behavioral metacognitive sensitivity, suggesting a role in monitoring the quality of subjective confidence. Finally, connectivity analyses demonstrate that dACC, parietal cortex and occipital visual areas, transferred decision-related information to rPFC to support confidence computation. In sum, our findings highlight a role for rPFC in integrating decisional signals from sensory and decision-processing stages to construct subjective confidence judgments.

Acknowledgements: This work was supported by STI2030-Major Projects (2021ZD0203600), National Natural Science Foundation of China (32571227), and the Research Center for Brain Cognition and Human Development, Guangdong, China (2024B0303390003).