Temporal metacognition as the decoding of self-generated brain dynamics

Abstract

Metacognition, the ability to know about one's thought process, is self-referential. Here, we studied the brain mechanisms underlying metacognitive inferences in a self-generated behavior. Human participants generated a time interval, and evaluated the signed magnitude of their timing (first and second order behavioral judgments, respectively) while being recorded with time-resolved neuroimaging. We show that the first- and second-order judgments relied on the power of beta oscillations (β 15-40 Hz), while error monitoring subsystems engaged alpha oscillations (α 8-14 Hz). The spread of an individual's β power state-space trajectories during timing was indicative of the individual's metacognitive inference. Our results suggest that network inhibition (β power) instantiates a state variable determining future network trajectory; this naturally provides a code for duration and metacognitive inferences would consist in reading out this state variable. Altogether, our study describes oscillatory mechanisms for timing suggesting that temporal metacognition relies on inferential processes of self-generated dynamics.