Confidence guides priority between forthcoming tasks

David Aguilar-Lleyda,Vincent De Gardelle

doi:10.1038/s41598-021-97884-2

Abstract

Humans can estimate confidence in their decisions, and there is increasing interest on how this feeling of confidence regulates future behavior. Here, we investigate whether confidence in a perceptual task affects prioritizing future trials of that task, independently of task performance. To do so, we experimentally dissociated confidence from performance. Participants judged whether an array of differently colored circles was closer to blue or red, and we manipulated the mean and variability of the circles’ colors across the array. We first familiarized participants with a low mean low variability condition and a high mean high variability condition, which were matched in performance despite participants being more confident in the former. Then we made participants decide in which order to complete forthcoming trials for both conditions. Crucially, prioritizing one condition was associated with being more confident in that condition compared to the other. This relationship was observed both across participants, by correlating inter-individual heterogeneity in prioritization and in confidence, and within participants, by assessing how changes in confidence with accuracy, condition and response times could predict prioritization choices. Our results suggest that confidence, above and beyond performance, guides prioritization between forthcoming tasks, strengthening the evidence for its role in regulating behavior.

Highlights

Humans can estimate confidence in their decisions, and there is increasing interest on how this feeling of confidence regulates future behavior
The present work aims at further investigating whether confidence might affect the prioritization of simple perceptual tasks
When participants had completed two decision tasks, they preferred to report first the decision for which they had a higher confidence. This result could not be accounted by task difficulty or by the accuracy of the two decisions, as we showed for instance that participants prioritized errors made with high confidence over low confidence correct responses, and that confidence affected the prioritization of responses even in trials where both difficulty and response accuracy were identical between the two decisions. This previous study[22] investigated how confidence might affect the prioritization of forthcoming tasks

Summary

Introduction

Humans can estimate confidence in their decisions, and there is increasing interest on how this feeling of confidence regulates future behavior. This result could not be accounted by task difficulty (as measured by the average performance in the task) or by the accuracy of the two decisions, as we showed for instance that participants prioritized errors made with high confidence over low confidence correct responses, and that confidence affected the prioritization of responses even in trials where both difficulty and response accuracy were identical between the two decisions This previous study[22] investigated how confidence might affect the prioritization of forthcoming tasks (i.e. tasks that have yet to be completed on future stimuli).

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