Confidence as a diagnostic tool for perceptual aftereffects

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Science
• Neuroscience
• Psychophysics

Background:

• Perceptual judgments arise from both sensory input and cognitive interpretation.
• Distinguishing between changes in perception (how the world appears) and judgment (interpretation) is challenging.
• This ambiguity fuels debates on decision-making and the influence of higher-order cognition on sensory experience.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and validate an approach for disambiguating sensory adaptation and decision biases in perceptual tasks.
• To investigate the distinct roles of perceptual decisions and subjective confidence in reflecting these processes.

Main Methods:

• Conducted three motion-direction psychophysics experiments.
• Measured both perceptual decisions and subjective confidence ratings.
• Analyzed how sensory adaptation and response bias differentially affect decision and confidence distributions.

Main Results:

• Both perceptual decisions and subjective confidence are sensitive to sensory information and adaptation.
• Both measures are also sensitive to decision biases, but impact distributions differently.
• Subjective confidence provides unique diagnostic information about the origin of perceptual aftereffects.

Conclusions:

• Subjective confidence is a crucial, often overlooked, measure in understanding perceptual changes.
• The proposed method effectively differentiates sensory adaptation from cognitive biases.
• This approach offers a way to resolve long-standing ambiguities in the study of perception and decision-making.