Abstract
Our minds constantly evaluate the confidence in what we see, think, and remember. Previous work suggests that confidence is a domain-general currency in adulthood, unifying otherwise independent sensory and perceptual representations. Here, we test whether children also possess a domain-general sense of confidence over otherwise independent perceptual dimensions. Six- to 9-year-olds completed either three simple perceptual discrimination tasks—a number task (“Which group has more dots?”), an area task (“Which blob is bigger?”), and an emotions task (“Which face is happier?”)—or three relative confidence tasks, selecting which of two trials they are more confident on. We find that while children’s discrimination performance across the three tasks was independent and constituted three separate factors, children’s confidence in each of three dimensions was strongly correlated and constituted only a single factor. Our results suggest that confidence is a domain-general currency even in childhood, providing a mechanism by which disparate perceptual representations could be integrated.
Highlights
To learn, represent, and think about the world, our minds constantly deal with uncertainty: Is my friend angry or surprised? Is it safe to cross the street? To make these decisions, we represent and reason about our confidence—the subjective probability of an outcome (Mamassian, 2016)—integrating it across different moments, contexts, and timescales
We have shown that children generally want to maximize their chance of success in relative confidence tasks and choose the trial in which they have more confidence, producing a metaratio effect: the larger the difference between two presented ratios, the more likely children are to indicate the easier trial as the one they are more confident in (Baer & Odic, 2018)
Children in the Discrimination condition performed above chance for all three dimensions, and performed significantly better at Area compared to Number, and at Number compared to Emotion, F(2, 80) = 14.67, p < .001, η2p =
Summary
Represent, and think about the world, our minds constantly deal with uncertainty: Is my friend angry or surprised? Is it safe to cross the street? To make these decisions, we represent and reason about our confidence—the subjective probability of an outcome (Mamassian, 2016)—integrating it across different moments, contexts, and timescales. What is the origin and nature of confidence representations, and how are they used to compare and integrate information across distinct and independent perceptual domains?. Recent work with adults has suggested that perceptual confidence may operate as a common, domain-general currency, interfacing and integrating across otherwise independent representations to guide optimal decision making. Adults show a strong correlation in their ability to judge confidence for line orientations versus spatial frequency, even though these two decisions are behaviorally and neurally independent (De Gardelle & Mamassian, 2014). A domain-general sense of confidence would help in part explain how children integrate and compare information across distinct and independent sources. A child trying to decide which of two groups is more socially dominant might compare their confidence in the numerical size of each group against their confidence in the physical size of each group (Pun, Birch, & Baron, 2016)
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