ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Neurosci.
Sec. Decision Neuroscience
Volume 19 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fnins.2025.1638734
This article is part of the Research TopicAdvances in Perceptual Decision Making and Brain OscillationsView all articles
Diminished Reactivity Effect of Confidence Rating on Perceptual Decision-Making in Depression
Provisionally accepted
- The Affiliated Hospital of Southwest Medical University, Luzhou, China
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Retrospective confidence ratings (CRs) after decision-making reactively lead to prolonged response times (RTs) and improved decision accuracy, a phenomenon known as the reactivity effect. This effect reflects an individual's metacognitive control processes. Little is known if depressive pathologies modify the reactivity effect in patients with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD). This study investigated the differences in the reactivity effect between 94 patients with MDD and 97 healthy controls (HCs), using a perceptual decision-making task and the Drift Diffusion Model (DDM) analysis. The results demonstrated that prompted CRs significantly prolonged RTs in both groups. However, prompted CRs improved decision accuracy in HCs, this effect was absent in the MDD group. DDM analysis revealed increased decision thresholds under CR conditions for both groups. Crucially, a significant group×condition interaction emerged for drift rate (v), with HCs demonstrating enhanced evidence accumulation speed compared to MDD patients. These findings indicate impaired metacognitive reactivity effects in MDD through confidence monitoring, highlighting deficits in metacognitive monitoring and control processes associated with depression.
Keywords: confidence ratings, Confidence reactivity effect, metacognition, Driftdiffusion model, Metacognitive control, Metacognitive monitoring
Received: 03 Jun 2025; Accepted: 21 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Zhang, Liu, Wang, Gong, Liu, Lei and Chen. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Jing Chen, The Affiliated Hospital of Southwest Medical University, Luzhou, China
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