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Poster Session C: Friday, August 15, 2:00 – 5:00 pm, de Brug & E‑Hall

Exploring the Neural Basis of Stimulus-Driven Overconfidence

Ema Zezelic¹, Florian Sandhaeger¹, Katrina R Quinn, Markus Siegel¹; ¹Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen

Presenter: Ema Zezelic

In decision-making, confidence is the ability to judge how likely our choices are to be correct or incorrect. Whilst this internal sense of accuracy can be a useful tool with which to adapt our behaviour, it is not always reliable. In fact, certain visual manipulations can lead observers to feel more confident even when the likelihood of correct choices remains the same. Here we used such a manipulation combined with magnetoencephalography, to investigate the neural basis of the “positive-evidence bias”. Participants performed a visual decision-making task with confidence judgements, in which we induced overconfidence in one of two conditions, while keeping accuracy between the conditions the same. We found evidence that the observed behavioral overconfidence could be explained by increased separation and variance of neural evidence representations and is not necessarily due to a higher-level cognitive bias.

Topic Area: Reward, Value & Social Decision Making

Extended Abstract: Full Text PDF