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Human behaviours are guided by how confident we feel in our abilities. When confidence does not reflect objective performance, this can impact critical adaptive functions and impair life quality. Distorted decision-making and confidence have been associated with mental health problems. Here, utilising advances in computational and transdiagnostic psychiatry, we sought to map relationships between psychopathology and both decision-making and confidence in the general population across two online studies (N’s = 344 and 473, respectively). The results revealed dissociable decision-making and confidence signatures related to distinct symptom dimensions. A dimension characterised by compulsivity and intrusive thoughts was found to be associated with reduced objective accuracy but, paradoxically, increased absolute confidence, whereas a dimension characterized by anxiety and depression was associated with systematically low confidence in the absence of impairments in objective accuracy. These relationships replicated across both studies and distinct cognitive domains (perception and general knowledge), suggesting that they are reliable and domain general. Additionally, whereas Big-5 personality traits also predicted objective task performance, only symptom dimensions related to subjective confidence. Domain-general signatures of decision-making and metacognition characterise distinct psychological dispositions and psychopathology in the general population and implicate confidence as a central component of mental health.

Experimental studies in cognitive science typically focus on the population average effect. An alternative is to test each individual participant and then quantify the proportion of the population that would show the effect: the prevalence, or participant replication probability. We argue that this approach has conceptual and practical advantages.

Schizophrenia is characterised by cognitive impairments that are already present during early stages, including in the clinical high-risk for psychosis (CHR-P) state and first-episode psychosis (FEP). Moreover, data suggest the presence of distinct cognitive subtypes during early-stage psychosis, with evidence for spared vs. impaired cognitive profiles that may be differentially associated with symptomatic and functional outcomes. Using cluster analysis, we sought to determine whether cognitive subgroups were associated with clinical and functional outcomes in CHR-P individuals. Data were available for 146 CHR-P participants of whom 122 completed a 6- and/or 12-month follow-up; 15 FEP participants; 47 participants not fulfilling CHR-P criteria (CHR-Ns); and 53 healthy controls (HCs). We performed hierarchical cluster analysis on principal components derived from neurocognitive and social cognitive measures. Within the CHR-P group, clusters were compared on clinical and functional variables and examined for associations with global functioning, persistent attenuated psychotic symptoms and transition to psychosis. Two discrete cognitive subgroups emerged across all participants: 45.9% of CHR-P individuals were cognitively impaired compared to 93.3% of FEP, 29.8% of CHR-N and 30.2% of HC participants. Cognitively impaired CHR-P participants also had significantly poorer functioning at baseline and follow-up than their cognitively spared counterparts. Specifically, cluster membership predicted functional but not clinical outcome. Our findings support the existence of distinct cognitive subgroups in CHR-P individuals that are associated with functional outcomes, with implications for early intervention and the understanding of underlying developmental processes.

When exposed to complementary features of information across sensory modalities, our brains formulate cross-modal associations between features of stimuli presented separately to multiple modalities. For example, auditory pitch-visual size associations map high-pitch tones with small-size visual objects, and low-pitch tones with large-size visual objects. Preferential, or congruent, cross-modal associations have been shown to affect behavioural performance, i.e. choice accuracy and reaction time (RT) across multisensory decision-making paradigms. However, the neural mechanisms underpinning such influences in perceptual decision formation remain unclear. Here, we sought to identify when perceptual improvements from associative congruency emerge in the brain during decision formation. In particular, we asked whether such improvements represent 'early' sensory processing benefits, or 'late' post-sensory changes in decision dynamics. Using a modified version of the Implicit Association Test (IAT), coupled with electroencephalography (EEG), we measured the neural activity underlying the effect of auditory stimulus-driven pitch-size associations on perceptual decision formation. Behavioural results showed that participants responded significantly faster during trials when auditory pitch was congruent, rather than incongruent, with its associative visual size counterpart. We used multivariate Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) to characterise the spatiotemporal dynamics of EEG activity underpinning IAT performance. We found an 'Early' component (∼100-110 ms post-stimulus onset) coinciding with the time of maximal discrimination of the auditory stimuli), and a 'Late' component (∼330-340 ms post-stimulus onset) underlying IAT performance. To characterise the functional role of these components in decision formation, we incorporated a neurally-informed Hierarchical Drift Diffusion Model (HDDM), revealing that the Late component decreases response caution, requiring less sensory evidence to be accumulated, whereas the Early component increased the duration of sensory-encoding processes for incongruent trials. Overall, our results provide a mechanistic insight into the contribution of 'early' sensory processing, as well as 'late' post-sensory neural representations of associative congruency to perceptual decision formation.

Functional connectivity (FC) metrics describe brain inter-regional interactions and may complement information provided by common power-based analyses. Here we investigated whether the FC-metrics weighted Phase Lag Index (wPLI) and weighted Symbolic Mutual Information (wSMI) may unveil functional differences across four stages of vigilance – wakefulness (W), NREM-N2, NREM-N3 and REM sleep – with respect to each other and to power-based features. Moreover, we explored their possible contribution in identifying differences between stages characterized by distinct levels of consciousness (REM+W vs. N2+N3) or sensory disconnection (REM vs. W). Overnight sleep and resting-state wakefulness recordings from 24 healthy participants (27±6yrs, 13F) were analysed to extract power and FC-based features in six classical frequency bands. Cross-validated linear discriminant analyses (LDA) were applied to investigate the ability of extracted features to discriminate i) the four vigilance stages, ii) W+REM vs. N2+N3, and iii) W vs. REM. For the four-way vigilance stages classification, combining features based on power and both connectivity metrics significantly increased accuracy relative to considering only power, wPLI or wSMI features. Delta-power and connectivity (0.5-4Hz) represented the most relevant features for all the tested classifications, in line with a possible involvement of slow waves in consciousness and sensory disconnection. Sigma-FC, but not sigma-power (12-16Hz), was found to strongly contribute to the differentiation between states characterized by higher (W+REM) and lower (N2+N3) probabilities of conscious experiences. Finally, alpha-FC resulted as the most relevant FC-feature for distinguishing among wakefulness and REM sleep and may thus reflect the level of disconnection from the external environment.

There is increasing focus in cognitive and computational neuroscience on the use of encoding and decoding models to gain insight into cognitive processing. Frequently, encoding models are fit to a number of different features sets, and the out-of-sample predictive performance of the resulting models is compared. However, to gain the maximum benefit from this modelling, we need to go beyond simply ranking model performance in terms of absolute predictive power. We also need to directly compare and relate the predictions between models, to gain insight into which models are predicting common vs unique aspects of the neural response. The Partial Information Decomposition (PID) provides a principled theoretical framework to address this question, as it decomposes the total predictive performance of two models into redundant (overlapping), unique, and synergistic parts. We show that like classical information theoretic quantities, variance decomposition approaches conflate synergy and redundancy and so could provide a misleading view of the unique predictive power of a model. We also suggest how the use of encoding models and PID can help interpret decoding models.

When we listen to speech, we have to make sense of a waveform of sound pressure. Hierarchical models of speech perception assume that, to extract semantic meaning, the signal is transformed into unknown, intermediate neuronal representations. Traditionally, studies of such intermediate representations are guided by linguistically defined concepts, such as phonemes. Here, we argue that in order to arrive at an unbiased understanding of the neuronal responses to speech, we should focus instead on representations obtained directly from the stimulus. We illustrate our view with a data-driven, information theoretic analysis of a dataset of 24 young, healthy humans who listened to a 1 h narrative while their magnetoencephalogram (MEG) was recorded. We find that two recent results, the improved performance of an encoding model in which annotated linguistic and acoustic features were combined and the decoding of phoneme subgroups from phoneme-locked responses, can be explained by an encoding model that is based entirely on acoustic features. These acoustic features capitalize on acoustic edges and outperform Gabor-filtered spectrograms, which can explicitly describe the spectrotemporal characteristics of individual phonemes. By replicating our results in publicly available electroencephalography (EEG) data, we conclude that models of brain responses based on linguistic features can serve as excellent benchmarks. However, we believe that in order to further our understanding of human cortical responses to speech, we should also explore low-level and parsimonious explanations for apparent high-level phenomena.

A fundamental challenge in neuroscience is to understand how the brain processes information. Neuroscientists have approached this question partly by measuring brain activity in space, time and at different levels of granularity. However, our aim is not to discover brain activity per se, but to understand the processing of information that this activity reflects. To make this brain-activity-to-information leap, we believe that we should reconsider brain imaging from the methodological foundations of psychology. With this goal in mind, we have developed a new data-driven framework, called Stimulus Information Representation (SIR), that enables us to better understand how the brain processes information from measures of brain activity and behavioral responses. In this article, we explain this approach, its strengths and limitations, and how it can be applied to understand how the brain processes information to perform behavior in a task.“It is no good poking around in the brain without some idea of what one is looking for. That would be like trying to find a needle in a haystack without having any idea what needles look like. The theorist is the [person] who might reasonably be asked for [their] opinion about the appearance of needles.” HC Longuet-Higgins, 1969.

The Partial Information Decomposition (PID) [arXiv:1004.2515] provides a theoretical framework to characterize and quantify the structure of multivariate information sharing. A new method (Idep) has recently been proposed for computing a two-predictor PID over discrete spaces. [arXiv:1709.06653] A lattice of maximum entropy probability models is constructed based on marginal dependency constraints, and the unique information that a particular predictor has about the target is defined as the minimum increase in joint predictor-target mutual information when that particular predictor-target marginal dependency is constrained. Here, we apply the Idep approach to Gaussian systems, for which the marginally constrained maximum entropy models are Gaussian graphical models. Closed form solutions for the Idep PID are derived for both univariate and multivariate Gaussian systems. Numerical and graphical illustrations are provided, together with practical and theoretical comparisons of the Idep PID with the minimum mutual information PID (Immi). [arXiv:1411.2832] In particular, it is proved that the Immi method generally produces larger estimates of redundancy and synergy than does the Idep method. In discussion of the practical examples, the PIDs are complemented by the use of deviance tests for the comparison of Gaussian graphical models., Comment: 39 pages, 9 figures, 9 tables

The problem of how to properly quantify redundant information is an open question that has been the subject of much recent research. Redundant information refers to information about a target variable S that is common to two or more predictor variables Xi. It can be thought of as quantifying overlapping information content or similarities in the representation of S between the Xi. We present a new measure of redundancy which measures the common change in surprisal shared between variables at the local or pointwise level. We provide a game-theoretic operational definition of unique information, and use this to derive constraints which are used to obtain a maximum entropy distribution. Redundancy is then calculated from this maximum entropy distribution by counting only those local co-information terms which admit an unambiguous interpretation as redundant information. We show how this redundancy measure can be used within the framework of the Partial Information Decomposition (PID) to give an intuitive decomposition of the multivariate mutual information into redundant, unique and synergistic contributions. We compare our new measure to existing approaches over a range of example systems, including continuous Gaussian variables. Matlab code for the measure is provided, including all considered examples., Comment: v3: revisions based on review process at Entropy (expand game-theory and max-ent motivation), v2: add game-theoretic operational definition for maximum entropy constraints; remove thresholding and normalisation of values on lattice

The model of the brain as an information processing machine is a profound hypothesis in which neuroscience, psychology and theory of computation are now deeply rooted. Modern neuroscience aims to model the brain as a network of densely interconnected functional nodes. However, to model the dynamic information processing mechanisms of perception and cognition, it is imperative to understand brain networks at an algorithmic level--i.e. as the information flow that network nodes code and communicate. Here, using innovative methods (Directed Feature Information), we reconstructed examples of possible algorithmic brain networks that code and communicate the specific features underlying two distinct perceptions of the same ambiguous picture. In each observer, we identified a network architecture comprising one occipito-temporal hub where the features underlying both perceptual decisions dynamically converge. Our focus on detailed information flow represents an important step towards a new brain algorithmics to model the mechanisms of perception and cognition.

In humans, the N170 event-related potential (ERP) is an integrated measure of cortical activity that varies in amplitude and latency across trials. Researchers often conjecture that N170 variations reflect cortical mechanisms of stimulus coding for recognition. Here, to settle the conjecture and understand cortical information processing mechanisms, we unraveled the coding function of N170 latency and amplitude variations in possibly the simplest socially important natural visual task: face detection. On each experimental trial, 16 observers saw face and noise pictures sparsely sampled with small Gaussian apertures. Reverse-correlation methods coupled with information theory revealed that the presence of the eye specifically covaries with behavioral and neural measurements: the left eye strongly modulates reaction times and lateral electrodes represent mainly the presence of the contralateral eye during the rising part of the N170, with maximum sensitivity before the N170 peak. Furthermore, single-trial N170 latencies code more about the presence of the contralateral eye than N170 amplitudes and early latencies are associated with faster reaction times. The absence of these effects in control images that did not contain a face refutes alternative accounts based on retinal biases or allocation of attention to the eye location on the face. We conclude that the rising part of the N170, roughly 120–170 ms post-stimulus, is a critical time-window in human face processing mechanisms, reflecting predominantly, in a face detection task, the encoding of a single feature: the contralateral eye.

SummaryHumans show a remarkable ability to understand continuous speech even under adverse listening conditions. This ability critically relies on dynamically updated predictions of incoming sensory information, but exactly how top-down predictions improve speech processing is still unclear. Brain oscillations are a likely mechanism for these top-down predictions [1, 2]. Quasi-rhythmic components in speech are known to entrain low-frequency oscillations in auditory areas [3, 4], and this entrainment increases with intelligibility [5]. We hypothesize that top-down signals from frontal brain areas causally modulate the phase of brain oscillations in auditory cortex. We use magnetoencephalography (MEG) to monitor brain oscillations in 22 participants during continuous speech perception. We characterize prominent spectral components of speech-brain coupling in auditory cortex and use causal connectivity analysis (transfer entropy) to identify the top-down signals driving this coupling more strongly during intelligible speech than during unintelligible speech. We report three main findings. First, frontal and motor cortices significantly modulate the phase of speech-coupled low-frequency oscillations in auditory cortex, and this effect depends on intelligibility of speech. Second, top-down signals are significantly stronger for left auditory cortex than for right auditory cortex. Third, speech-auditory cortex coupling is enhanced as a function of stronger top-down signals. Together, our results suggest that low-frequency brain oscillations play a role in implementing predictive top-down control during continuous speech perception and that top-down control is largely directed at left auditory cortex. This suggests a close relationship between (left-lateralized) speech production areas and the implementation of top-down control in continuous speech perception.