Choice Certainty Is Informed by Both Evidence and Decision Time
Open accessAbstract
"Degree of certainty" refers to the subjective belief, prior to feedback, that a decision is correct. A reliable estimate of certainty is essential for prediction, learning from mistakes, and planning subsequent actions when outcomes are not immediate. It is generally thought that certainty is informed by a neural representation of evidence at the time of a decision. Here we show that certainty is also informed by the time taken to form the decision. Human subjects reported simultaneously their choice and confidence about the direction of a noisy display of moving dots. Certainty was inversely correlated with reaction times and directly correlated with motion strength. Moreover, these correlations were preserved even for error responses, a finding that contradicts existing explanations of certainty based on signal detection theory. We also contrived a stimulus manipulation that led to longer decision times without affecting choice accuracy, thus demonstrating that deliberation time itself informs the estimate of certainty. We suggest that elapsed decision time informs certainty because it serves as a proxy for task difficulty.
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People may hold a belief that faster decisions are more likely to be accurate and use feelings of fluency to inform their confidence estimates.
“For instance, we may hold a belief that faster decisions are more likely to be accurate and use these feelings of fluency to inform our confidence estimates (Kiani et al. 2014).”
From Metacognition and Confidence: A Review and Synthesis (2024) · cites this paper as Kiani et al. 2014
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- Authors
- Kiani, R., Corthell, L., & Shadlen, M. N.
- Affiliations
- New York University (US)
- University of Alabama at Birmingham (US)
- Howard Hughes Medical Institute (US)
- Corresponding author
- Kiani, Roozbeh
- Venue
- Neuron
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2014-12
- Volume
- 84
- Issue
- 6
- Pages
- 1329-1342
- ISSN
- 0896-6273 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC4271191
- OpenAlex
- W2101518352
- Cited by
- 470
- References
- 79
- Citations by year
- 2026: 38 · 2025: 42 · 2024: 42 · 2023: 45 · 2022: 45 · 2021: 47 · 2020: 45 · 2019: 37 · 2018: 39 · 2017: 37 · 2016: 38 · 2015: 13 · 2014: 1
- FWCI
- 15.19
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Neuron (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (acceptedVersion)
- PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
- Funders
- Howard Hughes Medical Institute
- University of Washington
- National Eye Institute (EY11378, R01EY011378, P30EY013079)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Neural and Behavioral Psychology Studies
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › General Decision Sciences › Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Visual perception and processing mechanisms
- Keywords
- decision confidence, decision time, evidence accumulation, reaction time, motion direction discrimination, signal detection theory, error response, task difficulty, deliberation
- MeSH terms
- Choice Behavior, Eye Movements, Female, Humans, Motion Perception, Photic Stimulation, Reaction Time, Uncertainty, Young Adult
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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