Ricerc@Sapienza

The Frontal pole (FPC) has been studied by a neurophysiological point of view at the level of individual neurons in the macaque only in an earlier study. In my earlier study, I showed that FPC does not contribute to functions such as prospective memory or the implementation of rules but it instead could play a role in metacognition. However, the experimental design was not appropriate to test specifically a role in metacognition in a controlled manner. In this project, the goal is to study the neural basis of the meta-cognitive processes by recording individual neurons in macaque in a task in which the animal is trained to perform a perceptual task of varying difficulty in which increasing difficulties are associated with decreasing confidence levels about the correctness of their choice.
In this task at the end of the perceptual decision the animal is asked to bet in the bet stage making a second decision, by deciding based on the confidence level of his previous perceptual decision, whether its choice is correct or not choosing between two options "high bet" and "low bet", depending on whether the level of confidence about the correctness is high or low. The analysis of the neural activity associated with the perceptual information represented as a function of the two types of choice allows evaluating the role of the region in metacognition. Using the same task even in the observation condition where the macaque observes another human agent in the execution of the task also allows studying the role of FPC in monitoring others' decisions. This task by offering to the macaque the possibility to intervene in some trials in the bet stage of the human trials in place of the humans makes it possible to get a control on the effective monitoring realized by monkey on another agent's decision.