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October 1, 2021
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Unexpected arousal modulates the influence of sensory noise on confidence

Publicated to: Elife. 5 (OCTOBER2016): - 2016-10-25 5(OCTOBER2016), DOI: 10.7554/eLife.18103

Authors:

Allen, Micah; Frank, Darya; Schwarzkopf, D. Samuel; Fardo, Francesca; Winston, Joel S.; Hauser, Tobias U.; Rees, Geraint;
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Affiliations

Aarhus Univ Hosp, Danish Pain Res Ctr, Aarhus, Denmark - Author
Aarhus Univ, Interacting Minds Ctr, Aarhus, Denmark - Author
Max Planck Univ Coll London, Ctr Computat Psychiat & Ageing Res, London, England - Author
UCL, Expt Psychol, London, England - Author
UCL, Inst Cognit Neurosci, London, England - Author
UCL, Wellcome Trust Ctr Neuroimaging, London, England - Author
Univ Manchester, Div Neurosci & Expt Psychol, Manchester, Lancs, England - Author
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Abstract

Human perception is invariably accompanied by a graded feeling of confidence that guides metacognitive awareness and decision-making. It is often assumed that this arises solely from the feed-forward encoding of the strength or precision of sensory inputs. In contrast, interoceptive inference models suggest that confidence reflects a weighted integration of sensory precision and expectations about internal states, such as arousal. Here we test this hypothesis using a novel psychophysical paradigm, in which unseen disgust-cues induced unexpected, unconscious arousal just before participants discriminated motion signals of variable precision. Across measures of perceptual bias, uncertainty, and physiological arousal we found that arousing disgust cues modulated the encoding of sensory noise. Furthermore, the degree to which trial-bytrial pupil fluctuations encoded this nonlinear interaction correlated with trial level confidence. Our results suggest that unexpected arousal regulates perceptual precision, such that subjective confidence reflects the integration of both external sensory and internal, embodied states.
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Keywords

Adaptive gainAttentionBrainCertaintyDecisionFree-energyMetacognitionNeural gainSignal-detectionUncertainty

Quality index

Bibliometric impact. Analysis of the contribution and dissemination channel

The work has been published in the journal Elife due to its progression and the good impact it has achieved in recent years, according to the agency WoS (JCR), it has become a reference in its field. In the year of publication of the work, 2016, it was in position 4/85, thus managing to position itself as a Q1 (Primer Cuartil), in the category Biology.

From a relative perspective, and based on the normalized impact indicator calculated from World Citations provided by WoS (ESI, Clarivate), it yields a value for the citation normalization relative to the expected citation rate of: 2.74. This indicates that, compared to works in the same discipline and in the same year of publication, it ranks as a work cited above average. (source consulted: ESI Nov 13, 2025)

This information is reinforced by other indicators of the same type, which, although dynamic over time and dependent on the set of average global citations at the time of their calculation, consistently position the work at some point among the top 50% most cited in its field:

  • Weighted Average of Normalized Impact by the Scopus agency: 2.19 (source consulted: FECYT Mar 2025)

Specifically, and according to different indexing agencies, this work has accumulated citations as of 2025-12-21, the following number of citations:

  • WoS: 79
  • Scopus: 82
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Impact and social visibility

From the perspective of influence or social adoption, and based on metrics associated with mentions and interactions provided by agencies specializing in calculating the so-called "Alternative or Social Metrics," we can highlight as of 2025-12-21:

  • The use, from an academic perspective evidenced by the Altmetric agency indicator referring to aggregations made by the personal bibliographic manager Mendeley, gives us a total of: 383.
  • The use of this contribution in bookmarks, code forks, additions to favorite lists for recurrent reading, as well as general views, indicates that someone is using the publication as a basis for their current work. This may be a notable indicator of future more formal and academic citations. This claim is supported by the result of the "Capture" indicator, which yields a total of: 384 (PlumX).

With a more dissemination-oriented intent and targeting more general audiences, we can observe other more global scores such as:

  • The Total Score from Altmetric: 270.
  • The number of mentions on the social network Facebook: 3 (Altmetric).
  • The number of mentions on the social network X (formerly Twitter): 135 (Altmetric).
  • The number of mentions in news outlets: 18 (Altmetric).
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Leadership analysis of institutional authors

This work has been carried out with international collaboration, specifically with researchers from: Denmark; United Kingdom.

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Awards linked to the item

Wellcome Trust 100227 Micah Allen Geraint ReesEuopean Research Council 310829 D Samuel SchwarzkopfWellcome Trust 095939 Joel S WinstonWellcome Trust 91593 Micah Allen Darya Fran Joel S Winston Tobias U Hauser Geraint ReesSchweizerischer National fonds zur Forderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung 151641 Tobias U HauserThe funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication
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