Abstract
Peoples' subjective feelings of confidence typically correlate positively with objective measures of task performance, even when no performance feedback is provided. This relationship has seldom been investigated in the field of human time perception. Here we find a positive relationship between the precision of human timing perception and decisional confidence. We first demonstrate that subjective audio-visual timing judgements are more precise when people report a high, as opposed to a low, level of confidence. We then find that this relationship is more likely to result from variance in sensory timing estimates than the application of variable decision criteria, as the relationship held when we adopted a measure of timing sensitivity designed to limit the influence of subjective criteria. Our results suggest analyses of timing perception and associated decisional confidence reflect the trial-by-trial variability with which timing has been encoded.
Highlights
It has repeatedly been shown that humans can successfully report when their perceptual judgements have been accurate, even in the absence of explicit feedback regarding task performance
1.3 Discussion In Experiment 1 we aimed to determine whether humans have metacognitive insight into the strength of sensory evidence supporting their classifications of temporal order
We found participants were able to discern temporal order when presented with smaller temporal offsets on trials in which they had expressed high as opposed to low confidence
Summary
It has repeatedly been shown that humans can successfully report when their perceptual judgements have been accurate, even in the absence of explicit feedback regarding task performance (for reviews see Yeung & Summerfield, 2012; Fleming, Dolan, & Frith, 2012) This insight has been demonstrated in a number of contexts, including the differentiation of motion direction (Zylberberg, Barttfeld, & Sigman, 2012), spatial frequency, orientation (de Gardelle & Mamassian, 2014), and when judging luminancecontrast (Song et al, 2011). This suggests that, in each case, humans have access to an accurate reportable estimate concerning the strength of evidence underlying their perceptual decisions. The different sets of distributions seemed non-parallel, suggesting different computational processes had been involved in judgements of the two temporal orders
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