Error-related cardiac response as information for visibility judgements

Interoception provides information about the saliency of external or internal sensory events and thus may inform perceptual decision-making. Error in performance is an example of a motivationally significant internal event that evokes autonomic nervous system response resembling the orienting response: heart rate deceleration, increased skin conductance response, and pupil dilation. Here, we investigate whether error-related cardiac activity may serve as a source of information when making metacognitive judgments in an orientation discrimination backward masking task. In the first experiment, we found that the heart accelerates less after an incorrect stimuli discrimination than after a correct one. Moreover, this difference becomes more pronounced with increasing subjective visibility of the stimuli. In the second experiment, this accuracy-dependent pattern of cardiac activity was found only when participants listened to their own heartbeats, but not someone else’s. We propose that decision accuracy coded in cardiac activity may be fed as a cue to subjective visibility judgments.