Metacognition across sensory modalities: Vision, warmth, and nociceptive pain.

ABSTRACT: The distinctive experience of pain, beyond mere processing of nociceptive inputs, is much debated in psychology and neuroscience. One aspect of perceptual experience is captured by metacognition-the ability to monitor and evaluate one's own mental processes. We investigated confidence in judgements about nociceptive pain (i.e. pain that arises from the activation of nociceptors by a noxious stimulus) to determine whether metacognitive processes contribute to the distinctiveness of the pain experience. Our participants made intensity judgements about noxious heat, innocuous warmth, and visual contrast (first-order, perceptual decisions) and rated their confidence in those judgements (second-order, metacognitive decisions). First-order task performance between modalities was balanced using a

SUBMITTER: Beck B 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6411924 | biostudies-literature | 2019 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature