Weighting mean and variability during confidence judgments

Humans can not only perform some visual tasks with great precision, they can also judge how good they are in these tasks. However, it remains unclear how observers produce such metacognitive evaluations, and how these evaluations might be dissociated from the performance in the visual task. Here, we...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published inPloS one Vol. 10; no. 3; p. e0120870
Main Authors de Gardelle, Vincent, Mamassian, Pascal
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States Public Library of Science 20.03.2015
Public Library of Science (PLoS)
Subjects
Accuracy
Adult
Bias
Cognitive science
Confidence
Decision making
Humans
Judgment
Judgments
Logistic Models
Memory
Metacognition
Motion Perception
Noise
Observers
Photic Stimulation
Psychology
Quantitative psychology
Variance
Visual stimuli
Visual tasks
France
United States > US
psychophysics
decision-making
metacognition
perception
Online AccessGet full text

Cover

More Information
Summary:Humans can not only perform some visual tasks with great precision, they can also judge how good they are in these tasks. However, it remains unclear how observers produce such metacognitive evaluations, and how these evaluations might be dissociated from the performance in the visual task. Here, we hypothesized that some stimulus variables could affect confidence judgments above and beyond their impact on performance. In a motion categorization task on moving dots, we manipulated the mean and the variance of the motion directions, to obtain a low-mean low-variance condition and a high-mean high-variance condition with matched performances. Critically, in terms of confidence, observers were not indifferent between these two conditions. Observers exhibited marked preferences, which were heterogeneous across individuals, but stable within each observer when assessed one week later. Thus, confidence and performance are dissociable and observers' confidence judgments put different weights on the stimulus variables that limit performance.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-1
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-Feature-2
content type line 23
PMCID: PMC4368758
Competing Interests: The authors confirm that co-author Pascal Mamassian is a PLOS ONE Editorial Board member. This does not alter the authors adherence to PLOS ONE Editorial policies and criteria.
Conceived and designed the experiments: VdG PM. Performed the experiments: VdG. Analyzed the data: VdG. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: VdG. Wrote the paper: VdG PM.
ISSN:1932-6203
1932-6203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0120870