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Poster B24 in Poster Session B - Thursday, August 8, 2024, 1:30 – 3:30 pm, Johnson Ice Rink
Unethical amnesia brain: Memory and metacognitive distortion induced by dishonesty
Xinyi Xu1, Dean Mobbs2, Haiyan Wu1 (); 1Centre for Cognitive and Brain Sciences and Department of Psychology, University of Macau, 2Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences, California Institute of Technology
Unethical actions and decisions may distort human memory in two aspects: memory accuracy and metacognition. However, the neural and computational mechanisms underlying the metacognition distortion caused by repeated dishonesty remain largely unknown. Here, we performed two fMRI studies, including one replication study, with an information-sending task in the scanner. The main moral decision task in the scanner involves consistency and reward as two main factors, combined with a pre-scan and post-scan memory test together with mouse tracking. With multiple dimensions of metrics to measure metacognition, we test whether the inter-subject metacognition change correlates with how participants trade off consistency and reward. We find that the compression of representational geometry of reward in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) is correlated with both immediate and delayed metacognition changes. Also, the functional connectivity between the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and the left temporoparietal junction (lTPJ) under dishonest responses can predict both immediate and delayed metacognition changes in memory. These results suggest that decision-making, emotion, and memory-related brain regions together play a key role in metacognition change after immoral action, shedding light on the neural mechanism of the complex interplay between moral decisions, cognitive processes, and memory distortion.
Keywords: metacognition dishonesty decision making