Confidence reports during perceptual decision making dissociate from changes in subjective experience.
Communications psychology – May 21, 2025
Source: PubMed
Summary
Our brains can be tricked: even when making decisions about what we see, our confidence in those choices isn't just about perception. New research reveals that external factors, like how often we expect to see something or potential rewards, significantly influence how confident we feel about our visual decisions - even when our actual perception hasn't changed. This finding challenges how we understand decision-making and shows that our reported confidence levels may not reliably reflect our true perceptual experience.
Abstract
In noisy perceptual environments, people frequently make decisions based on non-perceptual information to maximize rewards. Therefore, a central problem in psychophysics, metacognition and consciousness research is to distinguish between decisions resulting from changes in subjective experience and those arising from non-perceptual information. It has recently been proposed that confidence reports can be used to discriminate between changes in subjective experience and those arising from non-perceptual information. Here we use a Bayesian ordinal modelling framework combined with an explicit measure of subjective experience to show across two experiments (N = 204) and three bias manipulations that confidence during perceptual decision-making does not uniquely reflect subjective experience. Instead, non-perceptual manipulations affecting response bias 'leak' into perceptual confidence reports. This occurs not only for biases resulting from changes in the base rate of stimuli ('cognitive' priors), but also when biasing information does not inform decision correctness (asymmetric payoff matrix). The relative strength of biases in first-order responses and confidence may help disentangle whether a given bias manipulation is perceptual in nature or not.