Metacognition is the ability to weigh the quality of our own cognition, such as the confidence that our perceptual decisions are correct. Here we ask whether metacognitive performance can itself be evaluated or else metacognition is the ultimate reflective human faculty. Building upon a classic visual perception task, we show that human observers are able to produce nested, above-chance judgements on the quality of their decisions at least up to the fourth order (i.e. meta-meta-meta-cognition). A computational model can account for this nested cognitive ability if evidence has a high-resolution representation, and if there are two kinds of noise, including recursive evidence degradation. The existence of fourth-order sensitivity suggests that the neural mechanisms responsible for second-order metacognition can be flexibly generalized to evaluate any cognitive process, including metacognitive evaluations themselves. We define the theoretical and practical limits of nested cognition and discuss how this approach paves the way for a better understanding of human self-regulation.

中文翻译：

---

对人类嵌套认知极限的信心

元认知是衡量我们自己认知质量的能力，例如我们的感知决策是正确的信心。在这里，我们询问元认知表现本身是否可以被评估，或者元认知是人类最终的反思能力。基于经典的视觉感知任务，我们表明人类观察者能够对他们的决策质量产生嵌套的、高于机会的判断，至少达到四阶（即元元元认知）。如果证据具有高分辨率表示，并且如果存在两种噪声，包括递归证据退化，则计算模型可以解释这种嵌套的认知能力。四阶敏感性的存在表明，负责二阶元认知的神经机制可以灵活地推广到评估任何认知过程，包括元认知评估本身。我们定义了嵌套认知的理论和实践限制，并讨论了这种方法如何为更好地理解人类自我调节铺平道路。