ANR.Confidence

Institut Jean-Nicod (IJN), UMR 8129, EHESS, DEC-ENS, CNRS, Paris

Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique (LSCP), UMR 8554, EHESS, DEC-ENS, CNRS, Paris

Laboratoire Langage Cognition Cerveau (LLCC), UMR 5230, CNRS, Lyon

Projet financé par l’Agence Nationale de la Recherche (2007-2010)   

Project coordinator : Elisabeth Pacherie (IJN)

Investigators: Sacha Bourgeois-Gironde (IJN), Jérôme Dokic (IJN), Paul Egré (IJN), Nadia Sachs (IJN), Jérôme Sackur (LSCP), Jean-Baptiste Van Der Henst, (LLCC) Frédérique de Vignemont (IJN), Tiziana Zalla  (IJN)

Subjective confidence in the correctness of a proposition and other cognate noetic feelings are kinds of metacognitive judgements. Subjective confidence has also much in common with certain forms of affective responses and may be thought to represent a blend between affective and cognitive processes. These feelings in turn are thought to influence and regulate cognitive processing. The study of subjective confidence is therefore at the intersection of three currently very active fields of research: metacognition, emotion and executive function research. Yet, cross talk between these research programmes has been limited. We think their respective insights can be fruitfully combined and extended.

Our objective is to develop and test a theoretical framework integrating these insights and fostering a better understanding of the interplay between the cognitive and affective dimensions of subjective confidence, its role in the regulation of cognitive processes, and its impairments in certain psychopathological conditions. This project is strongly interdisciplinary and centrally involves philosophical, psychological and clinical dimensions.  

·        The study of subjective confidence and its relation with metacognition, executive functioning and emotions raises a number of important conceptual issues in philosophy of mind, concerning the reliability of feelings of confidence, the relation between consciousness and behavior, the relation between metacognition and metarepresentational abilities, and the motivational role of noetic feelings.

·        People are often more confident than accurate. Most theoretical accounts of overconfidence have focused on social cognitive mechanisms and neglected affective components. In the present project, we wish to gain a better understanding of the respective role of cognitive and affective factors in overconfidence and of the mechanisms involved in in the reliable calibration of subjective confidence and actual performance in healthy adults.

·        Studying stages of ontogenetic development is a privileged way to probe and experimentally test a theoretical framework that articulates the affective and cognitive dimensions of noetic feelings and their role in the regulation of cognitive behavior. Most studies of metacognitive abilities in children rely on verbal tasks and report poor metacognitive skills in young children. However, the question whether preverbal children or infants possess partial metacognitive abilities as distinct from language mastery is still open. Verbal metacognition may occur late in human development while preverbal forms of metacognition, through monitoring of the feelings of confidence or uncertainty, may be present earlier. In the third section of this project, we investigate this issue using tasks relying on perceptual material (visual stimuli) with preschool children (3-5 years old).

·        Pathologies that involve joint metacognitive, executive and emotional impairments provide further opportunities to test our framework. We investigate subjective confidence in adults In addition to disturbances in social and metacognitive functioning, several studies have provided consistent evidence of executive impairments in Asperger Syndrome (AS) and autism. Individuals with AS are impaired in several tasks requiring the integration of emotion/affective contents and cognitive information. The study of error detection and performance monitoring in adults with AS is therefore of particular interest for understanding the interplay of executive, metacognitive and emotion factors defining the cognitive profile of AS subjects.

·        Delusional beliefs are typically held with a high degree of conviction. Delusions thus provide a clear case of dissociation between subjective confidence and objective accuracy (correctness of belief). Yet, people with monothematic delusions often do not suffer from any obvious general intellectual deficiency. It is therefore unclear whether the dissociation between subjective confidence and objective accuracy they exhibit can be explained in terms of the kind of general reasoning biases often reported in delusional patients with schizophrenia. We raise the issue whether in monothematic delusions this dissociation couldn't be related to affective factors, such as the emotional salience and valence of the delusion's content as well as its personal significance.