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Abstract

Higher order decision-making enables primates to behave adaptively in uncertain and complex social environments. I will present three studies that address metacognitive and social aspects of value-based decisions under uncertainty.

I will show that metacognitive evaluation via post-decision wagering enables humans to read out not only the strength but also both directions of certainty about preceding perceptual decision: certainty of having done a correct choice or of being incorrect. In several brain regions such as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and the intraparietal sulcus, this paradigm elicited fMRI activity consistent with bidirectional certainty encoding.

Extending previous finding that retrospective effort judgments are influenced by the magnitude of received rewards to a social setting, I will demonstrate that people also integrate reward information when judging the effort exerted by others, in Bayes optimal manner. Remarkably, the extent to which rewards influence effort judgments was correlated with conservative world-views, indicating that this phenomenon might be related to more general beliefs about the association between effort and reward in the society.

In the third part, I will compare the choice behavior in human, macaque, and human confederate-macaque pairs in the classical dyadic coordination game (‘Bach or Stravinsky’), implemented in a real-time visuomotor setting with two agents sitting vis-à-vis separated by a transparent screen and two-sided touch panel. I will describe different strategies the two species employ to converge to optimal (Nash) equilibria and “fair” outcomes. I will conclude by placing these findings in the context of game-theoretic framework we call “transparent games”, which addresses the probabilistic impact of partner’s action visibility on emergence and maintenance of coordination, and provides a model of interactions under time constraints.