Temporal attention causes systematic biases in visual confidence.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience
• Visual Perception

Background:

• Temporal attention selectively enhances stimulus representation over time.
• The capacity for attentional episodes is finite, but its impact on observer confidence remains poorly understood.
• Understanding confidence limitations is crucial for accurate perceptual modeling.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether observer confidence reflects the limitations imposed by temporal attention.
• To examine how confidence judgments are affected by the attentional blink phenomenon.
• To determine if confidence accurately tracks perceptual evidence and response selection under temporal constraints.

Main Methods:

• Adapted the attentional blink paradigm using a rapid visual stream of letters.
• Presented two targets requiring perceptual reports and confidence judgments.
• Analyzed the relationship between target processing, confidence, and response accuracy.

Main Results:

• A significant under-confidence bias was observed for the second target within a single attentional episode.
• Confidence strongly correlated with response probability, despite the under-confidence bias.
• Confidence failed to account for response selection delays, leading to misattributions of confidence to incorrect items.

Conclusions:

• Observer confidence does not perfectly reflect the constraints of temporal attention in demanding perceptual tasks.
• Confidence judgments may be influenced by factors other than the precise evaluation of attentional limitations.
• These findings highlight a dissociation between subjective confidence and objective performance under attentional load.