Modality independent or modality specific? Common computations underlie confidence judgements in visual and auditory...

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Computational Neuroscience
• Psychology

Background:

• Understanding how humans assess confidence in their decisions is crucial but remains unclear.
• Existing models often focus on single sensory modalities, limiting cross-modal insights.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate the computational mechanisms of confidence judgments in perceptual decisions.
• To determine if these mechanisms are consistent across visual and auditory modalities.

Main Methods:

• Computational modeling of confidence judgments in visual and auditory categorization tasks.
• Manipulation of evidence strength and sensory uncertainty.
• Comparison of scaled evidence strength, unscaled evidence strength, and Bayesian models.

Main Results:

• Participant confidence judgments aligned with scaled evidence strength models across both modalities.
• Bayesian models provided a weaker explanation, especially for complex tasks.
• Sensory uncertainty significantly impacts confidence evaluations.

Conclusions:

• A unified metacognitive process underlies confidence judgments in perceptual decisions across sensory domains.
• This common process is modulated by modality-specific parameter tuning.
• Sensory uncertainty plays a critical role in confidence assessment.