High-confidence Errors Research Articles

I misremember it well: Why older adults are unreliable eyewitnesses

We used the eyewitness suggestibility paradigm to investigate the hypothesis that cognitive aging is associated with an increase in misrecollections--confidently held but false memories of past events. When younger and older adults were matched on their overall memory for experienced events, both groups showed comparable rates of suggestibility errors in which they claimed to have seen events in a video that had only been suggested in a subsequent questionnaire. However, older adults were--alarmingly--most likely to commit suggestibility errors when they were most confident about the correctness of their response. By contrast, their younger, accuracy-matched counterparts were most likely to commit these errors when they were uncertain about the accuracy of their response. The elderly adults' propensity to make high-confidence errors fits our misrecollection account.

The correction of errors committed with high confidence

Most theories predict that when people indicate that they are highly confident they are producing their strongest responses. Hence, if such a high confidence response is in error it should be overwritten only with great difficulty. In contrast to this prediction, we have found that people easily correct erroneous responses to general information questions endorsed as correct with high-confidence, so long as the correct answer is given as feedback. Three potential explanations for this unexpected hypercorrection effect are summarized. The explanation that is tested here, in two experiments, is that after a person commits a high-confidence error the correct answer feedback, being surprising or unexpected, is given more attention than is accorded to the feedback to low-confidence errors. This enhanced attentional capture leads to better memory. In both experiments, a tone detection task was presented concurrently with the corrective feedback to assess the attentional capture of feedback stimuli. In both, tone detection was selectively impaired during the feedback to high confidence errors. It was also negatively related to final performance, indicating that the attention not devoted to the tone detection was effectively engaged by the corrective feedback. These data support the attentional explanation of the high-confidence hypercorrection effect.

When Seeing Is Misleading: Clutter Leads to High-Confidence Errors

Did you ever arrange to meet a friend at a busy street corner, then rush up to a total stranger thinking it was your friend? Neuroscientists have a theory to explain why such potentially embarrassing mistakes occur. We're trying to detect a target (our friend) amid a noisy background filled with distracters (a street filled with strangers) that impede our visual perception. Neuroscientists probe the underlying perceptual and neural processes of visual search by studying how distracters affect performance of a visual search task under controlled conditions in the lab.