To best interact with the external world, humans are often required to consider the quality of their actions. Sometimes the environment furnishes rewards or punishments to signal action efficacy. However, when such feedback is absent or only partial, we must rely on internally generated signals to evaluate our performance (i.e., metacognition). Yet, very little is known about how humans form such judgements of sensorimotor confidence. Do they monitor their actual performance or do they rely on cues to sensorimotor uncertainty? We investigated sensorimotor metacognition in two visuomotor tracking experiments, where participants followed an unpredictably moving dot cloud with a mouse cursor as it followed a random horizontal trajectory. Their goal was to infer the underlying target generating the dots, track it for several seconds, and then report their confidence in their tracking as better or worse than their average. In Experiment 1, we manipulated task difficulty with two methods: varying the size of the dot cloud and varying the stability of the target's velocity. In Experiment 2, the stimulus statistics were fixed and duration of the stimulus presentation was varied. We found similar levels of metacognitive sensitivity in all experiments, which was evidence against the cue-based strategy. The temporal analysis of metacognitive sensitivity revealed a recency effect, where error later in the trial had a greater influence on the sensorimotor confidence, consistent with a performance-monitoring strategy. From these results, we conclude that humans predominantly monitored their tracking performance, albeit inefficiently, to build a sense of sensorimotor confidence.

为了最好地与外部世界互动，人类通常需要考虑自己行为的质量。有时，环境会提供奖励或惩罚来表明行动的有效性。然而，当这种反馈不存在或仅是部分时，我们必须依靠内部生成的信号来评估我们的表现（即元认知）。然而，人们对人类如何形成这种感觉运动信心的判断却知之甚少。他们会监控自己的实际表现还是依赖感觉运动不确定性的线索？我们在两个视觉运动跟踪实验中研究了感觉运动元认知，其中参与者用鼠标光标跟随不可预测的移动点云，因为它遵循随机水平轨迹。他们的目标是推断生成这些点的潜在目标，跟踪它几秒钟，然后报告他们对跟踪的信心比平均水平更好或更差。在实验 1 中，我们通过两种方法控制任务难度：改变点云的大小和改变目标速度的稳定性。在实验 2 中，刺激统计数据是固定的，刺激呈现的持续时间是变化的。我们在所有实验中发现相似水平的元认知敏感性，这是反对基于线索的策略的证据。元认知敏感性的时间分析揭示了新近效应，试验后期的错误对感觉运动信心有更大的影响，这与表现监控策略一致。从这些结果中，我们得出结论，人类主要监控他们的跟踪表现，尽管效率低下，以建立感觉运动信心。