Humans create metacognitive beliefs about their performance across many levels of abstraction—from local confidence in individual decisions to global estimates of our skills and abilities. Despite a rich literature on the neural basis of local confidence judgements, how global self-performance estimates (SPEs) are constructed remains unknown. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we scanned human subjects while they performed several short blocks of tasks and reported on which task they think they performed best, providing a behavioral proxy for global SPEs. In a frontoparietal network sensitive to fluctuations in local confidence, we found that activity within ventromedial prefrontal cortex and precuneus was additionally modulated by global SPEs. In contrast, activity in ventral striatum was associated with subjects’ global SPEs irrespective of fluctuations in local confidence, and predicted the extent to which global SPEs tracked objective task difficulty across individuals. Our findings reveal neural representations of global SPEs that go beyond the tracking of local confidence, and lay the groundwork for understanding how a formation of global self-beliefs may go awry in conditions characterized by distorted self-evaluation.

人类在许多抽象层次上对自己的表现产生元认知信念——从对个人决策的本地信心到对我们技能和能力的全球估计。尽管有大量关于局部置信度判断神经基础的文献，但如何构建全局自我绩效估计 (SPE) 仍然未知。使用功能性磁共振成像，我们扫描了人类受试者，同时他们执行了几个简短的任务，并报告了他们认为自己执行得最好的任务，为全球 SPE 提供了行为代理。在对局部信心波动敏感的额顶叶网络中，我们发现腹内侧前额叶皮层和楔前叶内的活动还受到全局 SPE 的调节。相比之下，腹侧纹状体的活动与受试者的全局 SPE 相关，而与局部信心的波动无关，并预测了全局 SPE 跟踪个体客观任务难度的程度。我们的研究结果揭示了全球 SPE 的神经表征，这些表征超越了对局部信心的追踪，并为理解在以扭曲的自我评估为特征的条件下，全球自我信念的形成如何可能出错奠定了基础。