Global visual confidence
Open accessPublished version of a preprint
Abstract
Visual confidence is the observers’ estimate of their precision in one single perceptual decision. Ultimately, however, observers often need to judge their confidence over a task in general rather than merely on one single decision. Here, we measured the global confidence acquired across multiple perceptual decisions. Participants performed a dual task on two series of oriented stimuli. The perceptual task was an orientation-discrimination judgment. The metacognitive task was a global confidence judgment: observers chose the series for which they felt they had performed better in the perceptual task. We found that choice accuracy in global confidence judgments improved as the number of items in the series increased, regardless of whether the global confidence judgment was made before (prospective) or after (retrospective) the perceptual decisions. This result is evidence that global confidence judgment was based on an integration of confidence information across multiple perceptual decisions rather than on a single one. Furthermore, we found a tendency for global confidence choices to be influenced by response times, and more so for recent perceptual decisions than earlier ones in the series of stimuli. Using model comparison, we found that global confidence is well described as a combination of noisy estimates of sensory evidence and position-weighted response-time evidence. In summary, humans can integrate information across multiple decisions to estimate global confidence, but this integration is not optimal, in particular because of biases in the use of response-time information.
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Global confidence is informed by local confidence fluctuations during the previous block.
“Global confidence was informed by local confidence fluctuations during the previous block, and using fMRI, it was found that vmPFC and precuneus integrate local confidence over longer timescales to track aggregate self-performance (Rouault & Fleming 2020, Wittmann et al. 2016).”
From Metacognition and Confidence: A Review and Synthesis (2024) · cites this paper as Lee et al. 2021
The Discussion says that information from local confidence contributes to global estimates, and Experiment 2 reports integration across a set of perceptual decisions. The paper does not establish that the relevant fluctuations occurred during the previous block; its analyses concern decisions within a set. Page numbers are unavailable in our copy. (LLM, conf=0.83)
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- Authors
- Lee, A. L. F., de Gardelle, V., & Mamassian, P.
- Affiliations
- Lingnan Normal University (CN)
- École Normale Supérieure - PSL (FR)
- Venue
- Psychonomic Bulletin & Review
- Published
- 2021-03-25
- Volume
- 28
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 1233-1242
- ISSN
- 1069-9384 (ISSN-L)
- 1531-5320
- PMC
- PMC8367895
- OpenAlex
- W3136315776
- Cited by
- 32
- References
- 27
- Citations by year
- 2026: 4 · 2025: 4 · 2024: 4 · 2023: 15 · 2022: 4 · 2021: 1
- FWCI
- 3.15
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Locations
- Psychonomic Bulletin & Review (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- HAL (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- PsyArXiv (OSF Preprints) (submittedVersion)
- PsyArXiv (OSF Preprints) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- Funders
- Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR-18-CE28-0015, ANR-17-EURE-0017, ANR-10-BLAN-1910, ANR-10, ANR-16-CE28-0002)
- Lingnan University
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Visual perception and processing mechanisms
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Neural and Behavioral Psychology Studies
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Memory Processes and Influences
- Keywords
- metacognition, perceptual decision making, orientation discrimination, reaction time (psychology), sensory evidence, dual-task paradigm
- MeSH terms
- Metacognition, Decision Making, Humans, Judgment, Prospective Studies, Reaction Time, Retrospective Studies, Visual Perception
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