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Related Experiment Video

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Measuring the Subjective Value of Risky and Ambiguous Options using Experimental Economics and Functional MRI Methods

Measuring the Subjective Value of Risky and Ambiguous Options using Experimental Economics and Functional MRI Methods

Published on: September 19, 2012

Sources of confidence in value-based choice.

Jeroen Brus^1,2, Helena Aebersold³, Marcus Grueschow⁴

¹Decision Neuroscience Lab, Department of Health Sciences and Technology, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland. jeroen.brus@hest.ethz.ch.

Nature Communications

|December 18, 2021

Summary

Confidence in economic decisions stems from attentional effort, not encoding uncertainty. This finding clarifies how we attribute confidence and guides future choices and metacognitive awareness.

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Area of Science:

Neuroscience
Cognitive Science
Decision Science

Background:

Confidence judgments are crucial for learning and decision-making.
The precise origins of confidence in economic decisions are not fully understood.
Existing theories lack a clear explanation for confidence attributions.

Purpose of the Study:

To formally distinguish the sources of confidence in value-based economic decisions.
To investigate the roles of encoding/decoding uncertainty, gaze dynamics, and attentional effort.
To explain confidence (mis)attributions in value-guided behavior.

Main Methods:

Development of a novel task and computational framework.
Formal separation of confidence sources in value-based decisions.
Analysis of gaze-shift dynamics and attentional effort.

Main Results:

Value encoding precision influences economic choice consistency, but not confidence.
Confidence is linked to endogenous attentional effort towards choice options.
Confidence is also associated with downstream noise in the decision comparison process.

Conclusions:

Confidence in economic decisions arises from attentional effort and comparison noise, not initial value uncertainty.
Endogenous attentional states mechanistically influence decision-making and metacognitive awareness.
Provides a framework for understanding confidence attributions in behavior.