Abstract
Perceptual judgements are, by nature, a product both of sensation and the cognitive processes responsible for interpreting and reporting subjective experiences. Changed perceptual judgements may thus result from changes in how the world appears (perception), or subsequent interpretation (judgement). This ambiguity has led to persistent debates about how to interpret changes in decision-making, and if higher-order cognitions can change how the world looks, or sounds, or feels. Here we introduce an approach that can help resolve these ambiguities. In three motion-direction experiments, we measured perceptual judgements and subjective confidence. We show that each measure is sensitive to sensory information and can index sensory adaptation. Each measure is also sensitive to decision biases, but response bias impacts the central tendency of decision and confidence distributions differently. Our findings show that subjective confidence, when measured in addition to perceptual decisions, can supply important diagnostic information about the cause of aftereffects.
Highlights
A central challenge in perception research is to understand how the world looks, feels, and sounds, as opposed to how it is remembered, imagined, or judged
An aftereffect is a change in the measured boundary between perceptual categories, which can result from prolonged and repeated exposures to a specific stimulus[9,10,11,12], or rapidly from a single brief exposure to a test stimulus[13,14,15,16,17]. It remains a matter of debate, how best to dissociate perceptual from non-perceptual effects on decision-making[1,3,18,19]. We examine this problem by using motion-direction judgements and subjective confidence, and we show that reports of high and low confidence provide important information about the cause of changes in perceptual decisions
Since typical observers can accurately rate their own performance in perceptual decision tasks, confidence might provide important information about whether an aftereffect represents a change in a perceptual or decision boundary
Summary
Perceptual judgements are, by nature, a product both of sensation and the cognitive processes responsible for interpreting and reporting subjective experiences. Experiments 1 & 2 show that categorical decisions and confidence judgements can measure an aftereffect known to result from physiological processes that change perception (Experiment 1), but provide dissociable measures when ‘aftereffects’ instead result from people making different decisions about ambiguous inputs (Experiment 2) Having validated that both reports can index sensory adaptation, and dissociate when biased decisions are made under uncertainty, we adopted it to assess the likely cause of serial dependence. These effects were statistically equivalent (decision ΔPSE = 3.23, SD = 3.39; confidence ΔCONF = 3.34, SD = 2.10; difference, t21 = 0.20, p = 0.841), and a Bayes Factor analysis provided moderate evidence for the equivalence of the two 1-back effects (decision vs confidence BF10 = 0.23) This pattern of results is consistent with those obtained for the classic motion-direction aftereffect in Experiment 1, suggesting that serial dependence effects can be driven by processes that impact perception.
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