Confidence Is the Bridge between Multi-stage Decisions
Open accessAbstract
Demanding tasks often require a series of decisions to reach a goal. Recent progress in perceptual decision-making has served to unite decision accuracy, speed, and confidence in a common framework of bounded evidence accumulation, furnishing a platform for the study of such multi-stage decisions. In many instances, the strategy applied to each decision, such as the speed-accuracy trade-off, ought to depend on the accuracy of the previous decisions. However, as the accuracy of each decision is often unknown to the decision maker, we hypothesized that subjects may carry forward a level of confidence in previous decisions to affect subsequent decisions. Subjects made two perceptual decisions sequentially and were rewarded only if they made both correctly. The speed and accuracy of individual decisions were explained by noisy evidence accumulation to a terminating bound. We found that subjects adjusted their speed-accuracy setting by elevating the termination bound on the second decision in proportion to their confidence in the first. The findings reveal a novel role for confidence and a degree of flexibility, hitherto unknown, in the brain's ability to rapidly and precisely modify the mechanisms that control the termination of a decision.
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Variation in post-decision confidence predicts how likely the decision is to be revised if an opportunity arises.
“Variation in post-decision confidence predicts how likely the decision is to be revised if an opportunity arises,9”
From Two prefrontal-subcortical circuits estimate controllability and reflect its impact on learning (2026) · cites this paper as [10]
The Introduction and Results > Second of Two Decisions report that confidence after a first decision predicts the speed–accuracy strategy used for a separate, subsequent decision. They do not report whether confidence predicts the likelihood of revising the original decision when given an opportunity. (LLM, conf=0.84)
Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
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- Authors
- van den Berg, R., Zylberberg, A., Kiani, R., Shadlen, M. N., & Wolpert, D. M.
- Affiliations
- Howard Hughes Medical Institute (US)
- New York University (US)
- University of Cambridge (GB)
- Corresponding author
- Wolpert, Daniel M.
- Venue
- Current Biology
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2016-12
- Volume
- 26
- Issue
- 23
- Pages
- 3157-3168
- ISSN
- 0960-9822 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC5154755
- OpenAlex
- W2554642868
- Cited by
- 125
- References
- 48
- Citations by year
- 2026: 11 · 2025: 13 · 2024: 14 · 2023: 16 · 2022: 13 · 2021: 15 · 2020: 15 · 2019: 10 · 2018: 9 · 2017: 9
- FWCI
- 5.94
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Locations
- Current Biology (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- KTH Publication Database DiVA (KTH Royal Institute of Technology) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- Cambridge University Engineering Department Publications Database (submittedVersion)
- Apollo (University of Cambridge) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- Apollo (cc-by)
- Funders
- Wellcome Trust
- Human Frontier Science Program
- Royal Society
- Howard Hughes Medical Institute
- National Eye Institute (EY11378)
- Simons Collaboration on the Global Brain
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Neural and Behavioral Psychology Studies
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Visual perception and processing mechanisms
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › General Decision Sciences › Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics
- Keywords
- decision confidence, multi-stage decision making, perceptual decision making, evidence accumulation, speed-accuracy trade-off, sequential decision making
- MeSH terms
- Choice Behavior, Decision Making, Humans, Time Factors
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
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