Cognitive control
We constantly monitor and regulate our behaviour in order to achieve our goals and avoid errors. The internal evaluation of our behaviour and decisions – also known as metacognition – is of crucial importance in everyday life, as it guides our present and future behaviour. Metacognition encompasses both the detection of committed errors and a feeling of confidence that accompanies decision-making. As people get older, the need for accurate metacognitive evaluation increases; however, error detection rates typically decrease. We have shown that age-related difficulties in metacognitive evaluation may be related to impaired integration of decision accuracy and confidence information processing. Ultimately, training older adults in the metacognitive evaluation of fundamental decisions could prove to be a promising approach (Overhoff et al., 2021).
Interestingly, decision confidence is linked to motoric parameters of the responses reflecting this decision (i.e., response time and force). These relationships were moderated by the accuracy of the response, and, most importantly, changed markedly across the adult life span (Overhoff et al., 2022).
Besides, decision confidence also affects whether people change their mind after making a (perceptual) judgement. Findings suggest that decisions initially made with higher confidence may be more resistant to subsequent changes of mind, supporting the view that decisions and confidence judgements are based on partly dissociable sources of information (Ko et al., 2022). Furthermore, a recent study provided evidence that the processes that take place during decision-making are likely to substantively inform confidence judgments (Ko, Zhou et al., 2024).
Research on error processing suggests that when we make errors, adaptive processes are triggered to improve our behaviour. The processes and behavioural adjustments that take place may differ depending on whether the errors were detected or not. A common methodological challenge in studies investigating error detection is that the number of undetected errors is usually relatively low. To overcome this weakness, a recent study developed a new gamified experimental task that generated a high error rate, including many undetected errors (Niessen et al., 2026). This new task may lay the foundation for future research to better understand the (neural) processes underlying error processing and error awareness.
Selected publications:
- Ko YH, Feuerriegel D, Turner W, Overhoff H, Niessen E, Stahl J, Hester R, Fink GR, Weiss PH, Bode S (2022). Divergent effects of absolute evidence magnitude on decision accuracy and confidence in perceptual judgements. Cognition, 225, 105125. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105125
- Ko YH, Zhou A, Niessen E, Stahl J, Weiss PH, Hester R, Bode S, Feuerriegel D (2024). Neural correlates of confidence during decision formation in a perceptual judgment task. Cortex, 173, 248-262. doi: 10.1016/j.cortex.2024.01.006
- Niessen E, Wickert J, Schober M, Fink GR, Weiss PH, Stahl S. (2026). Characterizing the behavioural correlates of error awareness with the novel speeded inference task. Scientific Reports, 16(1), 17137. doi: 10.1038/s41598-026-56114-3
- Overhoff H, Ko YH, Feuerriegel D, Fink GR, Stahl J, Weiss PH, Bode S, Niessen E (2021). Neural correlates of metacognition across the adult lifespan. Neurobiology of Aging, 108, 34-46. doi: 10.1016/j.neurobiolaging.2021.08.001
- Overhoff H, Ko YH, Fink GR, Stahl J, Weiss PH, Bode S, Niessen E (2022). The relationship between response dynamics and the formation of confidence varies across the lifespan. Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, 14, 969074. doi: 10.3389/fnagi.2022.969074