Abstract
In an uncertain and ambiguous world, effective decision making requires that subjects form and maintain a belief about the correctness of their choices, a process called meta-cognition. Prediction of future outcomes and self-monitoring are only effective if belief closely matches behavioral performance. Equality between belief and performance is also critical for experimentalists to gain insight into the subjects' belief by simply measuring their performance. Assuming that the decision maker holds the correct model of the world, one might indeed expect that belief and performance should go hand in hand. Unfortunately, we show here that this is rarely the case when performance is defined as the percentage of correct responses for a fixed stimulus, a standard definition in psychophysics. In this case, belief equals performance only for a very narrow family of tasks, whereas in others they will only be very weakly correlated. As we will see it is possible to restore this equality in specific circumstances but this remedy is only effective for a decision-maker, not for an experimenter. We furthermore show that belief and performance do not match when conditioned on task difficulty – as is common practice when plotting the psychometric curve – highlighting common pitfalls in previous neuroscience work. Finally, we demonstrate that miscalibration and the hard-easy effect observed in humans' and other animals' certainty judgments could be explained by a mismatch between the experimenter's and decision maker's expected distribution of task difficulties. These results have important implications for experimental design and are of relevance for theories that aim to unravel the nature of meta-cognition.
Highlights
In an uncertain and ambiguous world, effective decision making requires computing one’s certainty about all decision-relevant evidence
We point out some pitfalls in previous neuroscience work, we provide a new hypothesis for the origin of the hard-easy effect, and we present a different perspective on models of confidence miscalibration [16,17,18]
We have described how the performance of a decision maker relates to its belief of having made the correct decision, and the relevance of this relation for both the decision maker’s selfmonitoring and an experimenter interested in the decision maker’s belief
Summary
In an uncertain and ambiguous world, effective decision making requires computing one’s certainty about all decision-relevant evidence. Driving too fast would result in a very high cost if hit by another car. On the other hand, could result in losing the job. There exists a large body of evidence that humans and animals encode such information, which allows them to feature a belief, or confidence, about the correctness of their decisions (a process sometimes referred to as meta-cognition) [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10]. Belief can be implicitly coded (e.g., a function of several variables of the decision process), unconscious in many cases and difficult - if not impossible - to access verbally
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