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Poster Session A: Tuesday, August 12, 1:30 – 4:30 pm, de Brug & E‑Hall

Bidirectional Interactions between Local and Global Confidence Explain the Pervasive Effect of Confidence Biases

Hélène Van Marcke¹, Senne Braem², Kobe Desender³; ¹Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, ²Universiteit Gent, ³KU Leuven

Presenter: Hélène Van Marcke

Research into decision confidence, i.e. the subjective feeling about the correctness of a decision, indicates important links between pervasive confidence biases and a variety of real-life outcomes and psychiatric symptoms. While decision confidence is traditionally studied in isolation, recent theoretical accounts posit that such “local” confidence about decisions interacts with global confidence, i.e. the general feeling about the ability to perform a task. Here, we provide empirical and modelling evidence for such bidirectional influences. Using a manipulation of global confidence, we measured both constructs in a perceptual decision paradigm. We found that local confidence is indeed informed by global confidence in addition to accuracy and RTs, while global confidence is informed by local confidence rather than accuracy and RTs. By explicitly modelling global confidence in a signal-detection theory framework, we provide computational evidence for bidirectional interactions between local and global confidence that explain the pervasive nature of confidence biases.

Topic Area: Reward, Value & Social Decision Making

Extended Abstract: Full Text PDF