PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Tadeusz W. Kononowicz
AU  - Clémence Roger
AU  - Virginie van Wassenhove
TI  - Temporal metacognition as the decoding of self-generated brain dynamics
AID  - 10.1101/206086
DP  - 2018 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 206086
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/08/07/206086.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/08/07/206086.full
AB  - Metacognition, the ability to know about one’s thought process, is self-referential. Here, we combined psychophysics and time-resolved neuroimaging to explore metacognitive inference on the accuracy of a self-generated behavior. Human participants generated a time interval and evaluated the signed magnitude of their temporal production. We show that both self-generation and self-evaluation relied on the power of beta oscillations (β; 15−40 Hz) with increases in early β power predictive of increases in duration. We characterized the dynamics of β power in a low dimensional space (β state-space trajectories) as a function of timing and found that the more distinct trajectories, the more accurate metacognitive inferences were. These results suggest that β states instantiates an internal variable determining the fate of the timing network’s trajectory, possibly as release from inhibition. Altogether, our study describes oscillatory mechanisms for timing, suggesting that temporal metacognition relies on inferential processes of self-generated dynamics.AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONSV.W., C.R., and T.W.K. designed the research. C.R. and T.W.K. performed the experiments. T.W.K. and V.W. analyzed the data. T.W.K. and V.W. wrote the manuscript.This work was supported by an ERC-YStG-263584, an ANR10JCJC-1904, and an ANR-16-CE37-0004-04to V.vW. We thank the members of UNIACT and the medical staff at NeuroSpin for their help in recruiting and scheduling participants. We thank members of UNICOG for fruitful discussions. Preliminary data were presented at SFN (2012, Washington DC), SFN (2015, Washington DC) and TRF (2017, Strasbourg).