Uncertainty information that is irrelevant for report impacts confidence judgments

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Visual Perception

Background:

• Human decision-making involves intuitive confidence judgments.
• Confidence and sensitivity are correlated, but confidence is disproportionately affected by signal variability.
• Prior research manipulated variability within the decision stimulus itself.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if variability in a non-task-relevant visual stimulus affects confidence in a secondary task.
• To determine if contextual visual variability impacts decision confidence independently of performance.

Main Methods:

• Three experiments were conducted using dot-motion displays.
• Participants judged brightness or direction of motion kinematograms with varying motion direction ranges.
• A postcue prompted participants to report on either brightness or direction after stimulus presentation.

Main Results:

• Increased range of motion directions reduced confidence in brightness judgments.
• Performance on the brightness judgment task remained unchanged despite reduced confidence.
• Variability in irrelevant visual context influenced confidence, not task performance.

Conclusions:

• Decision confidence is influenced by variability in the encoding context, not just the direct decision stimulus.
• Irrelevant visual variability can decrease confidence without impairing task performance.
• This highlights a dissociation between confidence and accuracy modulated by contextual factors.