# brain: spontaneous emergence of metacognition in neuronal computation.

<< ️Metacognition, a hallmark of human intelligence, enables individuals to assess prediction uncertainty, providing an advantage over artificial intelligence in anticipating risks and performing tasks that demand trustworthiness and reliability. >>

<< ️Here, (AA) demonstrate that metacognition can naturally emerge in recurrent neural networks trained on cognitive tasks without guidance from any probabilistic inference rules or additional network architectures. Through naturally embedded nonlinear coupling with the mean of the network output, the covariance of the network output engages in metacognition by assessing the uncertainty associated with the mean, which represents the task responses. >>

<< ️(AA) further propose testable predictions about how key features of neuronal computation in the brain—noise, neuronal correlations, and heterogeneity—contribute to metacognition. >>

Hengyuan Ma, Wenlian Lu, Jianfeng Feng. Spontaneous emergence of metacognition in neuronal computation. Phys. Rev. Research 7, 033188. Aug 22, 2025.

https://journals.aps.org/prresearch/abstract/10.1103/f1hv-bf1f

Also: brain, network, uncertainty, noise, chaos, in  https://www.inkgmr.net/kwrds.html 

Keywords: gst, brain, cognition, metacognition, learning, memory, networks, biological neural networks, biological information processing, decision making, uncertainty, stochasticity, noise, chaos.