Confidence reports during perceptual decision making dissociate from changes in subjective experience.
Communications psychology May 21, 2025 Nicolás Sánchez-Fuenzalida, Simon van Gaal, Stephen M Fleming et al. 3 citations
Confidence reports during perceptual decision-making do not uniquely reflect subjective experience. Across two experiments with 204 participants and three bias manipulations, non-perceptual factors such as changes in stimulus base rates or asymmetric payoff matrices leaked into confidence judgments. This shows that confidence can be influenced by response biases unrelated to actual perception, complicating its use as a pure measure of subjective experience. The relative strength of biases in first-order choices versus confidence may help distinguish whether a manipulation truly alters perception or only affects decision strategy.