title: Unexpected arousal modulates the influence of sensory noise on confidence.
abstract: Human perception is invariably accompanied by a graded feeling of confidence that guides metacognitive awareness and decision-making. It is often assumed that this arises solely from the feed-forward encoding of the strength or precision of sensory inputs. In contrast, interoceptive inference models suggest that confidence reflects a weighted integration of sensory precision and expectations about internal states, such as arousal. Here we test this hypothesis using a novel psychophysical paradigm, in which unseen disgust-cues induced unexpected, unconscious arousal just before participants discriminated motion signals of variable precision. Across measures of perceptual bias, uncertainty, and physiological arousal we found that arousing disgust cues modulated the encoding of sensory noise. Furthermore, the degree to which trial-by-trial pupil fluctuations encoded this nonlinear interaction correlated with trial level confidence. Our results suggest that unexpected arousal regulates perceptual precision, such that subjective confidence reflects the integration of both external sensory and internal, embodied states.
authors: Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, London, United Kingdom.|Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, University College London, London, United Kingdom.
authors: Micah
authors: 0000-0001-9399-4179
authors: M
authors: Allen
authors: Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, London, United Kingdom.|Division of Neuroscience and Experimental Psychology, University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom.
authors: Darya
authors: 0000-0001-6081-6755
authors: D
authors: Frank
authors: Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, London, United Kingdom.|Experimental Psychology, University College London, London, United Kingdom.
authors: D Samuel
authors: DS
authors: Schwarzkopf
authors: Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, London, United Kingdom.|Interacting Minds Centre, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark.|Danish Pain Research Center, Aarhus University Hospital, Aarhus, Denmark.
authors: Francesca
authors: 0000-0002-9974-6261
authors: F
authors: Fardo
authors: Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, London, United Kingdom.|Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, University College London, London, United Kingdom.
authors: Joel S
authors: 0000-0002-3957-0612
authors: JS
authors: Winston
authors: Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, University College London, London, United Kingdom.|Max Planck University College London Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research, London, United Kingdom.
authors: Tobias U
authors: 0000-0002-7997-8137
authors: TU
authors: Hauser
authors: Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, London, United Kingdom.|Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, University College London, London, United Kingdom.
authors: Geraint
authors: G
authors: Rees
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001143:Arousal; D003657:Decision Making; D004644:Emotions; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: arousal; cardiac responses; confidence; human; interoceptive inference; metacognition; neuroscience; pupillometry