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Metacognitive abilities allow us to adjust ongoing behavior and modify future decisions in the absence of external feedback. Although metacognition is critical in many daily life settings, it remains unclear what information is actually being monitored and what kind of information is being used for metacognitive decisions. In the present study, we investigated whether response information connected to perceptual events contribute to metacognitive decision-making. Therefore, we recorded EEG signals during a perceptual color discrimination task while participants were asked to provide an estimate about the quality of their decision on each trial. Critically, the moment participants provided their confidence judgments varied across conditions, thereby changing the amount of action information (e.g. response competition or response fluency) available for metacognitive decisions. Results from three experiments demonstrate that metacognitive performance improved when first-order action information was available at the moment metacognitive decisions about the perceptual task had to be provided. This behavioral effect was accompanied by enhanced functional connectivity (beta phase synchrony) between motor areas and prefrontal regions, exclusively observed during metacognitive decision-making. Our findings demonstrate that action information contributes to metacognitive decision-making, thereby painting a picture of metacognition as a process that integrates sensory evidence and information about our interactions with the world., SCOPUS: ar.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Consciousness remains a formidable challenge. Different theories of consciousness have proposed vastly different mechanisms to account for phenomenal experience. Here, appealing to aspects of global workspace theory, higher-order theories, social theories, and predictive processing, we introduce a novel framework: the self-organizing metarerpresentational account (SOMA), in which consciousness is viewed as something that the brain learns to do. By this account, the brain continuously and unconsciously learns to redescribe its own activity to itself, so developing systems of metarepresentations that qualify target first-order representations. Thus, experiences only occur in experiencers that have learned to know they possess certain first-order states and that have learned to care more about certain states than about others. In this sense, consciousness is the brain’s (unconscious, embodied, enactive, nonconceptual) theory about itself., SCOPUS: re.j, info:eu-repo/semantics/published

Chapter 1 starts with providing the theoretical background against which the experimental work in this thesis can be viewed. It provides the main approaches, theories and views on consciousness and the main challenges in the field. Specifically, it does so in relation to first-order and second- order neuronal processing, which will be explained later on. Furthermore, Chapter 1 discusses the conscious brain in its larger context of an embodied mind and the environment in which the agent lives. Lastly, the final section reviews the possibility of consciousness being a social construct. Chapter 2 continues with examining what happens when information-processing is limited to first-order processing, which is the case when information remains subliminal. Subliminal information does get processed up to a certain level, since brain activity in response to the stimulus can be measured. Yet, it is not processed up to the level that renders the stimulus conscious. The study presented in Chapter 2 aims to answer whether perceptual information presented below the conscious threshold can still affect behaviour? The outcome of this and similar studies would tell us more about the possible functions of consciousness. If subliminal stimuli are not able to influence behaviour, it would suggest that consciousness is necessary in order to guide or regulate human behaviour. Chapter 3 discusses how (changes in) perceptual content influences the subjective experience of time, a concept that is highly related to consciousness. Consciousness inevitably needs a reference or content to be conscious of. Similarly, time needs external physical events to occur to have any meaning, since time is generally only defined in terms of changes of state, mass or energy. Atomic clocks measure time by detecting changes in energy levels of electrons in atoms and are the most accurate timekeepers we have with an error rate of only 1 second per 30 million years. Therefore, no matter how small the event is, Doctorat en Sciences psychologiques et de l'éducation, info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished