Relating Introspective Accuracy to Individual Differences in Brain Structure

Abstract

Naval Gazing Simple perceptual tasks, such as detecting the contrast between light and dark bars in a grating, have been a mainstay of psychophysical research for decades. This kind of task makes it possible to obtain both an objective measure of how accurate subjects are and a subjective measure of how confident they are in their judgments. Fleming et al. (p. 1541 ; see the Perspective by Lau and Maniscalco ) have taken this approach one step further by constructing a measure of how accurate subjects are in their confidence judgments. This capacity for introspection, which can be regarded as one facet of metacognition (thinking about thinking), is shown to vary across individuals and to correlate positively with the gray matter volume of the frontopolar cortex (the frontmost region of the brain) and also with white matter in the tracts of the corpus callosum that connect these regions in the left and right hemispheres.