Mazor, Matan;
Maimon-Mor, Roni O;
Charles, Lucie;
Fleming, Stephen M;
(2023)
Paradoxical evidence weighting in confidence judgments for detection and discrimination.
Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics
10.3758/s13414-023-02710-8.
(In press).
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Abstract
When making discrimination decisions between two stimulus categories, subjective confidence judgments are more positively affected by evidence in support of a decision than negatively affected by evidence against it. Recent theoretical proposals suggest that this “positive evidence bias” may be due to observers adopting a detection-like strategy when rating their confidence—one that has functional benefits for metacognition in real-world settings where detectability and discriminability often go hand in hand. However, it is unknown whether, or how, this evidence-weighting asymmetry affects detection decisions about the presence or absence of a stimulus. In four experiments, we first successfully replicate a positive evidence bias in discrimination confidence. We then show that detection decisions and confidence ratings paradoxically suffer from an opposite “negative evidence bias” to negatively weigh evidence even when it is optimal to assign it a positive weight. We show that the two effects are uncorrelated and discuss our findings in relation to models that account for a positive evidence bias as emerging from a confidence-specific heuristic, and alternative models where decision and confidence are generated by the same, Bayes-rational process.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Paradoxical evidence weighting in confidence judgments for detection and discrimination |
| Location: | United States |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.3758/s13414-023-02710-8 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-023-02710-8 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © The Author(s). This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
| Keywords: | Confidence, Detection, Metacognition |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences > Experimental Psychology |
| URI: | https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10172608 |
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