TY - JOUR T1 - Human VMPFC encodes early signatures of confidence in perceptual decisions. AU - Gherman,Sabina, AU - Philiastides,Marios G, Y1 - 2018/09/24/ PY - 2018/05/29/received PY - 2018/09/20/accepted PY - 2018/9/25/pubmed PY - 2019/2/6/medline PY - 2018/9/25/entrez KW - EEG KW - confidence KW - decision-making KW - fMRI KW - human KW - modeling KW - neuroscience KW - single-trial JF - eLife JO - Elife VL - 7 N2 - Choice confidence, an individual's internal estimate of judgment accuracy, plays a critical role in adaptive behaviour, yet its neural representations during decision formation remain underexplored. Here, we recorded simultaneous EEG-fMRI while participants performed a direction discrimination task and rated their confidence on each trial. Using multivariate single-trial discriminant analysis of the EEG, we identified a stimulus-independent component encoding confidence, which appeared prior to subjects' explicit choice and confidence report, and was consistent with a confidence measure predicted by an accumulation-to-bound model of decision-making. Importantly, trial-to-trial variability in this electrophysiologically-derived confidence signal was uniquely associated with fMRI responses in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC), a region not typically associated with confidence for perceptual decisions. Furthermore, activity in the VMPFC was functionally coupled with regions of the frontal cortex linked to perceptual decision-making and metacognition. Our results suggest that the VMPFC holds an early confidence representation arising from decision dynamics, preceding and potentially informing metacognitive evaluation. SN - 2050-084X UR - https://www.unboundmedicine.com/medline/citation/30247123/Human_VMPFC_encodes_early_signatures_of_confidence_in_perceptual_decisions_ DB - PRIME DP - Unbound Medicine ER -