Information seeking without metacognition

Humans and other creatures seek information to improve their cognition and behaviour. Theories in cognitive neuroscience, developmental psychology and animal cognition tend to assume a strong connection between information seeking behaviour and explicit metacognition – conscious introspection about our mental states and subjective metacognitive feelings like confidence or uncertainty. However, recent developments in computational neuroscience have stressed that metacognition and uncertainty are not equivalent, and many forms of uncertainty may be monitored in the brain without generating subjective metacognitive feelings. Here, across a series of experiments in adult humans, we show that information seeking and subjective confidence are controlled by distinct forms of uncertainty. In particular, information seeking (but not confidence) is controlled by uncertainty in sampled sensory evidence while confidence (but not information seeking) is controlled by uncertainty caused by decision boundaries. This double dissociation suggests that separate computations in the mind and brain shape confidence and information seeking: undermining the idea that information seeking behaviour always depends on conscious introspection into our own states of mind.