Judging the difficulty of perceptual decisions

Area of Science:

• Cognitive psychology
• Decision science

Background:

• Accurate difficulty judgments are crucial for effective task planning and resource allocation.
• Existing models explain choice, reaction time, and confidence, but not prospective difficulty judgments.

Approach:

• Investigated difficulty judgments in a perceptual decision-making task involving dynamic random dot patches.
• Participants estimated which patch would be easier to determine the dominant color.

Key Points:

• Difficulty judgments improved with greater differences in stimulus difficulty.
• Reaction times were influenced by stimulus difficulty, not just the difference between them.
• A model comparing absolute accumulated evidence best explained participants' difficulty judgments.

Conclusions:

• Participants compare accumulated evidence, not confidence, to estimate task difficulty.
• Findings extend evidence accumulation frameworks to encompass prospective difficulty assessments.
• This research provides insights into the cognitive mechanisms underlying planning and decision-making.