Research reveals the neural basis of self-awareness of Chinese writing ability

"Do you think how well you write your own words?"
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When we are answering this question, we need to evaluate our own writing ability, and the accuracy of this estimation depends on the individual's self-awareness, that is, the metacognitive ability
.

Metacognition is the ability to reflect and control cognitive processing, which plays an important role in regulating daily activities
.

Previous studies have investigated the brain mechanisms of human perception and memory metacognition, but lacked understanding of the metacognition and neural basis of motor skills, especially highly skilled motor skills
.

Chinese character writing is a highly skilled visual motor processing involving multiple brain functional areas (Yang et al.
, 2018; Yang et al.
, 2019; Li et al.
, 2021), and it shows significant individual differences (Yang et al.
, 2018; Yang et al.
, 2019; Li et al.
, 2021).
et al.
, 2020)
.

Bi Hongyan's research group at the Key Laboratory of Behavioral Sciences, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, used magnetic resonance imaging technology to explore the neural basis of the metacognition of adult Chinese character writing ability
.

The study quantified the accuracy of self-assessment based on the difference between the participants' self-assessment of writing quality and other assessments in the transcription task
.

It turns out that people usually overestimate the quality of their writing, and the degree of overestimation of men is significantly higher than that of women
.

Brain structure-behavior correlation analysis found that the accuracy of an individual's self-estimation of writing quality is positively correlated with the gray matter volume of the three brain regions of the left fusiform gyrus, right middle frontal gyrus, and right precuneus
.

The left fusiform gyrus and the right middle frontal gyrus belong to the writing processing brain network, which has not been reported in other fields, and may represent the specific brain mechanism of writing metacognition, while the right precuneus is involved in memory and perceptual metacognition.
There are also reports in the study of knowledge, reflecting a general metacognitive brain mechanism in the field
.

Studies have shown that people still lack accurate self-awareness for highly skilled writing ability, and this kind of metacognitive evaluation relies on the general and specific brain structure of the domain
.

For the first time, this research associates metacognition, a high-level cognitive component, with writing motor ability, enriching the cognitive model of writing processing
.

At the same time, the research also expands people's understanding of the neural basis of human metacognition
.

Related results are published online on Brain Structure and Function
.

The research work was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China
.

The brain structure basis of writing quality self-awareness Source: Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences