Concurrent metacognitive evaluation is dissociable from perceptual evidence accumulation in the parietal cortex

Lateral intraparietal area (LIP) in macaques shows ramping population dynamics for perceptual choices but lacks accumulator-like signatures for uncertainty responses, with uncertainty rising late and stereotypically.

• Why it matters: Adaptive opt-out behavior requires real-time monitoring of decision reliability, but it is unclear whether uncertainty is computed within the same circuit that accumulates perceptual evidence or by a separate parallel process.
• What they did: Two macaques performed a perceptual discrimination task with concurrent opt-out requests; behavioral model comparison favored a race between perceptual and uncertainty accumulators, and single-unit LIP recordings were tested against recurrent neural network architectures.
• The result: The segregated architecture predicts the data: LIP activity matches perceptual accumulation signatures and shows none for uncertainty, implying metacognitive monitoring is dissociable from LIP’s perceptual evidence accumulation.

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