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The idiosyncratic nature of confidence

Navajas, J; Hindocha, C; Foda, H; Keramati, M; Latham, PE; Bahrami, B; (2017) The idiosyncratic nature of confidence. Nature Human Behaviour , 1 pp. 810-818. 10.1038/s41562-017-0215-1. Green open access

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Abstract

Confidence is the ‘feeling of knowing’ that accompanies decision-making. Bayesian theory proposes that confidence is a function solely of the perceived probability of being correct. Empirical research has suggested, however, that different individuals may perform different computations to estimate confidence from uncertain evidence. To test this hypothesis, we collected confidence reports in a task in which subjects made categorical decisions about the mean of a sequence. We found that for most individuals, confidence did indeed reflect the perceived probability of being correct. However, in approximately half of them, confidence also reflected a different probabilistic quantity: the perceived uncertainty in the estimated variable. We found that the contribution of both quantities was stable over weeks. We also observed that the influence of the perceived probability of being correct was stable across two tasks, one perceptual and one cognitive. Overall, our findings provide a computational interpretation of individual differences in human confidence.

Type: Article
Title: The idiosyncratic nature of confidence
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1038/s41562-017-0215-1
Publisher version: http://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-017-0215-1
Language: English
Additional information: © 2017 Macmillan Publishers Limited, part of Springer Nature. All rights reserved. This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions.
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences > Clinical, Edu and Hlth Psychology
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences > Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences > Gatsby Computational Neurosci Unit
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1575640
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