Subjective Reports Of Confidence Research Articles

Prior information differentially affects discrimination decisions and subjective confidence reports

According to Bayesian models, both decisions and confidence are based on the same precision-weighted integration of prior expectations (“priors”) and incoming information (“likelihoods”). This assumes that priors are integrated optimally and equally in decisions and confidence, which has not been tested. In three experiments, we quantify how priors inform decisions and confidence. With a dual-decision task we create pairs of conditions that are matched in posterior information, but differ on whether the prior or likelihood is more informative. We find that priors are underweighted in discrimination decisions, but are less underweighted in confidence about those decisions, and this is not due to differences in processing time. The same patterns remain with exogenous probabilistic cues as priors. With a Bayesian model we quantify the weighting parameters for the prior at both levels, and find converging evidence that priors are more optimally used in explicit confidence, even when underused in decisions.

Microgravity induces overconfidence in perceptual decision-making

Does gravity affect decision-making? This question comes into sharp focus as plans for interplanetary human space missions solidify. In the framework of Bayesian brain theories, gravity encapsulates a strong prior, anchoring agents to a reference frame via the vestibular system, informing their decisions and possibly their integration of uncertainty. What happens when such a strong prior is altered? We address this question using a self-motion estimation task in a space analog environment under conditions of altered gravity. Two participants were cast as remote drone operators orbiting Mars in a virtual reality environment on board a parabolic flight, where both hyper- and microgravity conditions were induced. From a first-person perspective, participants viewed a drone exiting a cave and had to first predict a collision and then provide a confidence estimate of their response. We evoked uncertainty in the task by manipulating the motion’s trajectory angle. Post-decision subjective confidence reports were negatively predicted by stimulus uncertainty, as expected. Uncertainty alone did not impact overt behavioral responses (performance, choice) differentially across gravity conditions. However microgravity predicted higher subjective confidence, especially in interaction with stimulus uncertainty. These results suggest that variables relating to uncertainty affect decision-making distinctly in microgravity, highlighting the possible need for automatized, compensatory mechanisms when considering human factors in space research.

Neural activity tracking identity and confidence in social information.

Humans learn about the environment either directly by interacting with it or indirectly by seeking information about it from social sources such as conspecifics. The degree of confidence in the information obtained through either route should determine the impact that it has on adapting and changing behaviour. We examined whether and how behavioural and neural computations differ during non-social learning as opposed to learning from social sources. Trial-wise confidence judgements about non-social and social information sources offered a window into this learning process. Despite matching exactly the statistical features of social and non-social conditions, confidence judgements were more accurate and less changeable when they were made about social as opposed to non-social information sources. In addition to subjective reports of confidence, differences were also apparent in the Bayesian estimates of participants' subjective beliefs. Univariate activity in dorsomedial prefrontal cortex and posterior temporoparietal junction more closely tracked confidence about social as opposed to non-social information sources. In addition, the multivariate patterns of activity in the same areas encoded identities of social information sources compared to non-social information sources.

Confidence in risky value-based choice.

Risk engenders a phenomenologically distinct experience from certainty, often driving people to behave in ostensibly irrational ways, and with potential consequences for our subjective sense of confidence in having made the best choice. While previous work on decision confidence has largely focused on ambiguous perceptual decisions or value-based choices under certainty, it is unclear how subjective confidence reports are formed during risky value-based choice (i.e. those with uncertain outcomes). Accordingly, we sought to examine the effect of risky (versus certain) choice upon confidence ratings in a calibrated economic choice task and explore the well-documented interrelationships between confidence and subjective value (SV) as well as choice response time (RT) in the context of value-based choice. By jointly analyzing choices (risky versus certain), SV of the chosen option, confidence, and RT, we found a systematic effect of risk on subjective confidence: subjective confidence reports were significantly higher when selecting a certain prospect compared with a risky one. Interestingly, risk attenuated the strength of the relationships between confidence and both RTs and difference in subjective value (ΔSV), as well as the relationship between RT and ΔSV. Taken together, these results corroborate how choice, RT, confidence and SV relate in value-based choice under risk, informing both theories of confidence and risk preferences.

Performance monitoring during categorization with and without prior knowledge: A comparison of confidence calibration indices with the certainty criterion.

Subjective confidence reports are used in numerous research paradigms to examine the extent to which participants are aware of their performance in a task. By examining the discrepancy between objective performance and subjective confidence ratings, inferences can be made about the conditions in which participants have greater explicit knowledge of the representations and processes used to complete a task. In the current study, we examined the effects of prior knowledge on subjective assessments of performance using a categorisation task wherein lists of features that defined exemplars shared latent feature associations on the basis of prior knowledge or had no prior associations. Using 2 methods for computing confidence, we demonstrate the strengths and limitations of these measures of subjective awareness. Whereas our findings replicated the effect of prior knowledge on learning, our results challenge the role of explicit and implicit knowledge suggested by previous research using a similar paradigm. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Clinician Response to Child Abuse Presentations in the Vietnamese Hospital Emergency Setting.

Ongoing fiscal stability has enabled the National Assembly in Vietnam to turn its attention to improving the health and well-being of women and children. Training pediatric health care professionals in the recognition and response to child abuse presentations in the emergency setting has the potential to improve outcomes for the disproportionate number of vulnerable children presenting to the emergency setting with nonaccidental injuries. This study explored the training needs and expectations of the staff preparing to undertake such a clinical training program. This qualitative study is based on semistructured interviews with 16 clinicians from the emergency setting of a leading pediatric hospital in Vietnam. Interview questions focused on current practice in recognizing and responding to child abuse and neglect presentations, the level of training and experience of participants, and subjective reports of confidence in recognizing abuse. Interviews were conducted in English and Vietnamese, with check-translation of transcripts performed by an independent translator. A culture of collegiality and innovative workplace practices was revealed. Analysis revealed two overarching themes that were related to the need for evidence, forensic analysis, respecting families, and consultation. Despite participant confidence in recognizing and reporting child abuse and neglect presentations, knowledge deficits were found. This article presents a critical analysis of the context within which the first evidence-based clinical training program of its kind in Vietnam was developed and implemented in a pediatric children's hospital. Clinicians felt a strong moral obligation to protect children from further harm, however encountered a number of barriers inhibiting this process. Findings significantly shaped the Safe Children Vietnam training program and will also contribute to the development of protocols and improvement of community support services at the study site.

Brain networks for confidence weighting and hierarchical inference during probabilistic learning

Learning is difficult when the world fluctuates randomly and ceaselessly. Classical learning algorithms, such as the delta rule with constant learning rate, are not optimal. Mathematically, the optimal learning rule requires weighting prior knowledge and incoming evidence according to their respective reliabilities. This "confidence weighting" implies the maintenance of an accurate estimate of the reliability of what has been learned. Here, using fMRI and an ideal-observer analysis, we demonstrate that the brain's learning algorithm relies on confidence weighting. While in the fMRI scanner, human adults attempted to learn the transition probabilities underlying an auditory or visual sequence, and reported their confidence in those estimates. They knew that these transition probabilities could change simultaneously at unpredicted moments, and therefore that the learning problem was inherently hierarchical. Subjective confidence reports tightly followed the predictions derived from the ideal observer. In particular, subjects managed to attach distinct levels of confidence to each learned transition probability, as required by Bayes-optimal inference. Distinct brain areas tracked the likelihood of new observations given current predictions, and the confidence in those predictions. Both signals were combined in the right inferior frontal gyrus, where they operated in agreement with the confidence-weighting model. This brain region also presented signatures of a hierarchical process that disentangles distinct sources of uncertainty. Together, our results provide evidence that the sense of confidence is an essential ingredient of probabilistic learning in the human brain, and that the right inferior frontal gyrus hosts a confidence-based statistical learning algorithm for auditory and visual sequences.

Metacognitive sensitivity of subjective reports of decisional confidence and visual experience.

Previous studies provided contradicting results regarding metacognitive sensitivity estimated from subjective reports of confidence in comparison to subjective reports of visual experience. We investigated whether this effect of content of subjective reports is influenced by the statistical method to quantify metacognitive sensitivity. Comparing logistic regression and meta-d in a masked orientation task, a masked shape task, and a random-dot motion task, we observed metacognitive sensitivity of reports regarding decisional confidence was greater than of reports about visual experience irrespective of mathematical procedures. However, the relationship between subjective reports and the logistic transform of accuracy was often not linear, implying that logistic regression is not a consistent measure of metacognitive sensitivity. We argue that a science of consciousness would benefit from the assessment of both visual experience and decisional confidence, and recommend meta-d as measure of metacognitive sensitivity for future studies.

Variance misperception explains illusions of confidence in simple perceptual decisions.

Confidence in a perceptual decision is a judgment about the quality of the sensory evidence. The quality of the evidence depends not only on its strength ('signal') but critically on its reliability ('noise'), but the separate contribution of these quantities to the formation of confidence judgments has not been investigated before in the context of perceptual decisions. We studied subjective confidence reports in a multi-element perceptual task where evidence strength and reliability could be manipulated independently. Our results reveal a confidence paradox: confidence is higher for stimuli of lower reliability that are associated with a lower accuracy. We show that the subjects' overconfidence in trials with unreliable evidence is caused by a reduced sensitivity to stimulus variability. Our results bridge between the investigation of miss-attributions of confidence in behavioral economics and the domain of simple perceptual decisions amenable to neuroscience research.

Do changes in the subjective experience of recognition over time suggest independent processes?

Two experiments examined the nature of recognition memory by asking how subjective reports of remembering change over time. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to report their experience of remembering using the well-known remember-know-guess procedure. Estimates of recollection declined over a 14-day period, but estimates of familiarity remained constant, suggesting that the processes are independent. In Experiment 2, participants were asked to report their confidence in their recognition decisions. Subjective reports of confidence were analysed via receiver operating characteristics and also indicated different rates of decline for recollection and familiarity. Superficially, the data appear to support a dual-process account of recognition, but close inspection shows the data to be consistent with a simple signal detection model. The conclusion is that although the phenomenal experience of remembering changes over time this is most likely to be predicated on a single process.

Preparation for practice: how can medical schools better prepare PRHOs?

There is growing evidence that new PRHOs feel unprepared for their first post. This study compared three cohorts of graduates, the first from a traditional systems-based curriculum, the second from the same systems-based curriculum, who had also taken an intercalated degree, and the third from a PBL curriculum who had not intercalated. Subjective reports of confidence in clinical skills, anxiety and feelings of preparedness for practice were assessed using a previously published instrument. Graduates from the PBL curriculum who had not intercalated felt significantly better prepared, less anxious and more confident than equivalent graduates from the systems-based curriculum. Systems-based curriculum graduates who had taken an additional intercalated degree scored as highly in these criteria as the PBL graduates who had not intercalated. Despite these improvements, absolute levels of anxiety remained high and feelings of preparedness and confidence in clinical skills remained poor.

Sources of confidence judgments in implicit cognition

Subjective reports of confidence are frequently used as a measure of awareness in a variety of fields, including artificial grammar learning. However, little is known about what information is used to make confidence judgments and whether there are any possible sources of information used to discriminate between items that are unrelated to confidence. The data reported here replicate an earlier experiment by Vokey and Brooks (1992) and show that grammaticality decisions are based on both the grammatical status of items and their similarity to study exemplars. The key finding is that confidence ratings made on a continuous scale (50%-100%) are closely related to grammaticality but are unrelated to all of the measures of similarity that were tested. By contrast, confidence ratings made on a binary scale (high vs. low) are related to both grammaticality and similarity. The data confirm an earlier finding (Tunney & Shanks, 2003) that binary confidence ratings are more sensitive to low levels of awareness than continuous ratings are and suggest that participants are conscious of all the information acquired in artificial grammar learning.