To make effective decisions, adequate monitoring of one’s actions is not enough, an ability that allows us to learn from mistakes, and not even a good sensitivity to uncertainty, a quality we already have as newborns and which leads us, for example, to give up on a decision when we are not sure enough that it will really lead to the desired result. A certain degree of awareness of the reliability of one’s judgments is also necessary, even before knowing whether they will be correct or not, and of the effectiveness of one’s actions: this is the so-called “perceived self-efficacy” or “self-efficacy”.
Experimental confirmation comes from neuroscience that the two processes – that of learning a skill and the metacognitive reasoning on its implementation – are headed by brain circuits that can act independently of each other. The study, which appeared in the journal “Plos One”, was conducted by a team of cognitive psychologists from the University of Bologna in Cesena: 51 subjects were asked which was the direction of movement of some luminous dots in coherent motion to the right or left, trying to perceive them in less than half a second among a cloud of other dots moving at the same speed, but chaotically.
After each answer, the subjects were also asked to rate how confident they felt of the correctness of their judgment, grading the difficulty of the task according to the percentage of dots in the cloud that moved coherently. It is a complex visual task, involving the primary visual cortex (V1), whose activity is modulated by feedback loops from many other brain areas. Among these, there are the secondary visual area (V5), which makes us perceive movement, and the intraparietal sulcus IPS, which corresponds to the lateral parietal area of primates and which appears to be involved precisely in “self efficacy”.
Through non-invasive brain stimulation, the researchers modulated the influences of the two areas (V5 and ISP) on the primary vision and measured how the subjects’ perceptive accuracy and “confidence” varied, i.e., the ability to evaluate own performance, observing how the two areas affect the two independently. “We have seen that the stimulation of the second network, the one between the parietal area and the V1 area, improves the participants’ awareness of their performance, without modifying the results of the performance itself”, confirms Alessio Avenanti, one of the authors of study. “Conversely, the stimulation of the first network (V5-V1) does not improve the level of subjective awareness of the participants’ performance, while objectively improving the final results”.
The sense of perceived self-efficacy is very important: it is closely correlated with “self-confidence”, it determines the strategies that we will eventually implement to correct performance and it influences people’s behavior so much that many studies show a close correlation with performance . The importance of this process is well explained by Stephen Fleming, director of MetaLab at the Wellcome Center for Human Neuroimaging of University College London in his latest essay “Knowing yourself. The new science of self-awareness” (Raffaello Cortina editor). “What people believe about their abilities and skills – he writes – is just as, if not more, important to their motivation and well-being than their objective abilities”. And he adds: “People’s beliefs in their own effectiveness influence almost everything they do: how they think, how they motivate themselves, how they feel and how they behave.
Unfortunately, we are often victims of metacognitive illusions. Thus, on the one hand, feeling incapable or not up to a certain task can lead to giving up any attempt and, therefore, to failure, reinforcing the initial conviction. On the other hand, there is overconfidence. Whether it is due to a real lack of self-awareness or a real bluff to the detriment of others, it causes the individual to convincingly exhibit signs of competence, even more so than truly competent individuals. With negative consequences also for the same subject, as shown by the case of bankruptcy enterprises, for example mountain expeditions that ended in tragedy when born out of the push of overly ambitious goals.
“We can choose an internal representation of the world that does not correspond to a faithful representation of reality, if this choice is the least expensive for us and the most functional to our adaptation: in these cases the integration between signal processing and internal model tends to dissociate, rather than integrate”, comments the research coordinator Vincenzo Romei. “Recognition of such behavioral and neural dissociations could lead to the identification of different cognitive profiles and, in more extreme cases, even psychiatric conditions.”
The good news is that metacognitive monitoring, which is the ability to adjust one’s judgment of safety and self-confidence to one’s actual performance, can be trained and improved. In addition to the obvious practical implications, there is also a purely cognitive coté: metacognition and sensitivity to uncertainty are considered fundamental building blocks of self-awareness, until recently considered a human prerogative.
