Metacognition in human decision-making: confidence and error monitoring

People are capable of robust evaluations of their decisions: they are often aware of their mistakes even without explicit feedback, and report levels of confidence in their decisions that correlate with objective performance. These metacognitive abilities help people to avoid making the same mistakes twice, and to avoid overcommitting time or resources to decisions that are based on unreliable evidence. In this review, we consider progress in characterizing the neural and mechanistic basis of these related aspects of metacognition-confidence judgements and error monitoring-and identify crucial points of convergence between methods and theories in the two fields. This convergence suggests that common principles…