Preserved metacognition for undetected visuomotor deviations

Description: Humans can successfully correct deviations of ongoing movements without conscious detection of such deviations, suggesting limited awareness of movement details. Here, we ask whether such limited awareness impairs the ability to judiciously rate confidence (metacognition). To this end, we recorded functional magnetic resonance imaging data while participants (n=31) detected cursor deviations during a visuomotor reaching task and rated their confidence retrospectively. We show that participants monitor a summary statistic of the unfolding visual feedback (the peak cursor error) to detect visuomotor deviations. The same summary statistics is used by participants to adjust their confidence ratings, even when they report being unaware of a deviation. Crucially, confidence ratings were as metacognitively efficient for aware and unaware deviations. At the neural level, activity in the ventral striatum tracks high confidence, whereas a broad network including the anterior prefrontal cortex encodes cursor error but not confidence. These findings shed new light on dissociable processes subserving action monitoring and confidence. More broadly, our results challenge the notion of limited conscious action monitoring and uncover how humans monitor their movements as they unfold, even when unaware of ongoing deviations.