Scene variability shapes the link between metacognitive estimates and action decisions

Poster Presentation: Sunday, May 18, 2025, 2:45 – 6:45 pm, Banyan Breezeway
Session: Decision Making: Actions

Cristina de la Malla1, Joan López-Moliner1, David Aguilar-Lleyda1; 1Vision and Control of Action Group, Department of Cognition, Development, and Psychology of Education, Institute of Neurosciences, Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain

Sensorimotor tasks often require us to rely on visual information to evaluate situational risk while considering one’s own perceptuo-motor abilities to decide whether and how to act. To investigate the interplay between these evaluations and actions in complex environments, we designed a virtual reality task where participants (N=30) stood in front of a crosswalk. On each trial, two groups of three cars each approached the crosswalk from opposite sides. All cars reached the crosswalk simultaneously, with times-to-contact (TTC) of 3.35, 4.09, 5.00, 6.11 or 7.46 seconds in different trials. Scene variability was manipulated by varying the uniformity of car speeds within each trial: all cars moved at the same, slightly different or clearly different speeds (no, mid and high variability, respectively). In different conditions, participants either (1) assessed perceived risk, (2) evaluated their confidence in crossing successfully and (3) actually crossed the street if they so decided. Both TTC and speed variability influenced responses across conditions: longer TTC and lower speed variability led to higher confidence, lower perceived risk, and more frequent crossings. Across-participant correlations revealed a strong inverse relationship between confidence and perceived risk. Higher confidence and lower risk were also related with more crosses, but only when speed variability was high. This was produced by higher speed variability decreasing confidence and increasing perceived risk more than it reduced crosses, effectively aligning metacognition and action decisions. Conversely, TTC did not produce any coherent modulation of the relationship between perceived risk / confidence and crosses. Overall, our findings suggest that scene variability influences differently metacognitive estimates and action decisions.

Acknowledgements: This work was supported by grants PID2023-150883NB-I00 and CNS2022-135808 to CM and by grant PID2023-150081NB-I00 to JLM, funded by MICIU/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by the European Union NextGenerationEU/PRTR.