Feeling lucky? prospective and retrospective cues for sensorimotor confidence

On a daily basis, humans interact with the outside world using judgments of sensorimotor confidence, constantly evaluating our actions for success. We ask, what sensory and motor-execution cues are used in making these judgements and when are they available? Two sources of temporally distinct information are prospective cues, available prior to the action (e.g., knowledge of motor noise and past performance), and retrospective cues specific to the action itself (e.g., proprioceptive measurements). We investigated the use of these two cues in two tasks, a secondary motor-awareness task and a main task in which participants reached toward a visual target with an unseen hand and then made a continuous judgment of confidence about the success of the reach. Confidence was reported by setting the size of a circle centered on the reach-target location, where a larger circle reflects lower confidence. Points were awarded if the confidence circle enclosed the true endpoint, with fewer points returned for larger circles. This incentivized accurate reaches and attentive reporting to maximize the score. We compared three Bayesian-inference models of sensorimotor confidence based on either prospective cues, retrospective cues, or both sources of information to maximize expected gain (i.e., an ideal-performance model). Our findings showed two distinct strategies: participants either performed as ideal observers, using both prospective and retrospective cues to make the confidence judgment, or relied solely on prospective information, ignoring retrospective cues. Thus, participants can make use of retrospective cues, evidenced by the behavior observed in our motor-awareness task, but these cues are not always included in the computation of sensorimotor confidence. Author summarySensorimotor confidence is a secondary judgment about how successful we feel a motor action was with relation to the goal. To make this judgment we can draw on information available before we execute an action such as our past experiences and knowledge of the environment, as well as after the action including visual feedback and proprioception, a sense of where our body is in space. In this study, we inquired as to how the information available before and after an action is weighted when considering the final feeling of sensorimotor confidence. To do so we asked participants to make reaches to visually cued targets in an unseen hand task, then report their confidence in how successful they were at hitting the target. We measured each participant's reach accuracy and proprioceptive sensitivity in a separate task. Using mathematical models to fit our data we tested if a given participant depended more heavily on prior information or retrospective information when making their confidence judgment. We found that participants with high proprioceptive uncertainty were more likely to focus on prior knowledge while those with a more exact sense of proprioception incorporated information from both time points.