Abstract
Choice certainty is a probabilistic estimate of past performance and expected outcome. In perceptual decisions the degree of confidence correlates closely with choice accuracy and reaction times, suggesting an intimate relationship to objective performance. Here we show that spatial and feature-based attention increase human subjects' certainty more than accuracy in visual motion discrimination tasks. Our findings demonstrate for the first time a dissociation of choice accuracy and certainty with a significantly stronger influence of voluntary top-down attention on subjective performance measures than on objective performance. These results reveal a so far unknown mechanism of the selection process implemented by attention and suggest a unique biological valence of choice certainty beyond a faithful reflection of the decision process.
Highlights
Life boils down to a series of choices you make or do not, many of them depend on pending outcomes of previous choices
We show for the first time that spatial and feature-based attention increase human subjects’ certainty more than accuracy in visual motion discrimination tasks
To investigate the effects of top-down selective attention on choice accuracy and certainty in perceptual decision making, we had human subjects discriminate global visual motion embedded in noise for attended and unattended stimuli and rate the confidence of their response
Summary
Life boils down to a series of choices you make or do not, many of them depend on pending outcomes of previous choices. We show for the first time that spatial and feature-based attention increase human subjects’ certainty more than accuracy in visual motion discrimination tasks. Both for certainty reported via post-decision wagering [1,19] and numerical confidence ratings, we observe higher changes of overall confidence levels than in actual performance. This dissociation of subjective and objective performance measures suggests a unique biological valence of choice certainty beyond a faithful reflection of the decision process and rather proposes an implementation by different mechanisms, differing neuronal substrates or in a larger neuronal network
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