Today lets talk about metacognition! Uh... yeah...Metacognition, boy that word sure sounds fancy but... what the heck is it?

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Metacognition is, to boil it down to the basics, the act of thinking about thinking. It's the mechanism by which we know what problem solving skills to apply to a given situation! We can observe it in our own confidence in the decisions we make.

Source: quickmeme.com

The article we are going to discuss today was published in the journal eLife May 10, 2017 and is titled "Noradrenaline blockade specifically enhances metacognitive performance."

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Why study this?

The authors justify their research because impaired metacognitive function are common in a bunch of psychiatric disorders, citing specifically: schizophrenia, ADHD and compulsion disorders. [3], [4], [5]. People with these diseases are thought to struggle with thinking about their own thinking, and as a result have difficulties with decision making.

Unfortunately for these people, the origin of metacognitive thinking in the brain isn't well understood (so I guess that means scientists are having trouble thinking about thinking about thinking). Yet there has been some research pointing in the direction of the involvement of two different hormones (neurotransmitters): noradrenaline and dopamine. They are known to be involved in higher-order thinking processes in the brain and are found in high concentrations in brain regions like the prefrontal cortex which is thought to be involved in decision making.[8]

In the article we are discussing the authors wanted to understand if either of these two hormones actually had an effect on metacognitive thinking.

What Did They Do?

In this double blind study participants were given one of two drugs (or placebos): amisulpride which blocks dopamine binding to its receptor, or propranolol which blocks noradrenaline from binding to its receptor. After being administered the drugs (or placebos) participants were then tested for their metacognitive abilities through use of what they called a "global motion discrimination task with subsequent confidence judgements."

Basically the participants saw a bunch of dots moving around randomly on a screen with an average motion traveling to either the left or the right. The participants had to indicate what direction overall the dots were moving and then indicate their confidence in their decision through use of a sliding scale with high confidence being on the right and low on the left.

What Did They Find?

Figure Attribution: eLife

Here we are looking at the responses relative to the confidence in the participants decision making, the better a group was with metacognition the more confident they are going to be in their decision making. The plot in (A) is looking at peoples confidence of being correct (Y-axis) against incorrect (X-axis), more confidence in correct decisions shows up as more area filled in the upper left half of the plot. The area under these curves was then plotted by bar graph in (B) for easier visualization. Here we can directly compare the placebo group (no drugs, grey), to those who had noradrenaline blocked (pink) with those who had dopamine blocked (orange). What is clear from this plot is that the group that had noradrenaline blocked (with propranolol) had statistically significantly higher confidence in their decision making, then did either the control (placebo), or dopamine blocked groups! The plot (C) in the figure is just the data reported by the individual participants, again you can see that their is more pink dots higher up (indicative of a higher confidence rating for the noradrenaline blocked group).

The Noradrenaline Blocked Group Wasn't More Confident In Being Correct...

The researchers looked further at the data and found that the Noradrenaline blocked group wasn't actually more confident in their correct answers, but actually significantly less confident when they were wrong, which is what skewed their results higher.

What To Take Away From This?

Confidence is important in our decision making. Being confident in decisions that lead to bad performance in situations will result in negative long term life effects. This is what happens to the people with psychiatric disorders, they are impaired in their metacognitive functioning and are confident in decision making processes that people with out the disorders would not be confident in.

The researchers here showed that blocking noradrenaline with the drug propanolol can lead to better metacognitive functioning (reducing confidence in poor outcome driving situations). However this research is not without its caveats and the researchers discuss them in detail. One such caveat is the dosing of the two drugs, little is known about how comparable the doses were that the participants were given. The researchers state that:

We took great care in the design of the study to render the two drug conditions as comparable as possible.

And go on to describe the methods by which they did that, however also acknowledge:

However, we know little about the magnitude of these drug effects on the brain.

So while this research is interesting, little is know about WHY this result happens. Nevertheless, the data is what it is, and perhaps work like this may lead to a new tool to aide those who suffer with mental disorders and the resultant impaired judgement.

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Sources

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metacognition
2. https://elifesciences.org/content/6/e24901
3. http://www.schres-journal.com/article/S0920-9964(09)00211-4/fulltext
4. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1087054705280159
5. http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/01/05/098277
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norepinephrine
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dopamine
8. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352154614000278

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Any Gifs Are From Giphy.com and Are Also Available for Use Under Creative Commons Licences

Images from figures in eLife articles are available for reuse under a Creative Commons Attribution license (all figures will be appropriately attributed and linked back to the article of reference).

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