Comparing Bayesian and non-Bayesian accounts of human confidence reports.

ABSTRACT: Humans can meaningfully report their confidence in a perceptual or cognitive decision. It is widely believed that these reports reflect the Bayesian probability that the decision is correct, but this hypothesis has not been rigorously tested against non-Bayesian alternatives. We use two perceptual categorization tasks in which Bayesian confidence reporting requires subjects to take sensory uncertainty into account in a specific way. We find that subjects do take sensory uncertainty into account when reporting confidence, suggesting that brain areas involved in reporting confidence can access low-level representations of sensory uncertainty, a prerequisite of Bayesian inference. However, behavior is not fully consistent with the Bayesian hypothesis and is better described by simple heuristi

SUBMITTER: Adler WT 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6258566 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature