From Local to Global Estimations of Confidence in Perceptual Decisions

• Published in: Journal of experimental psychology. General 2023-09, Vol.152 (9), p.2544-2558
• Main Authors: Cavalan, Quentin, Vergnaud, Jean-Christophe, de Gardelle, Vincent
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Bias; Cognitive science; Confidence; Decision Making; Estimation; Human; Judgment; Knowledge; Perceptual Organization; Self-Confidence
• ISSN: 0096-3445; 1939-2222
• DOI: 10.1037/xge0001411

Perceptual confidence has been an important topic recently. However, one key limitation in current approaches is that most studies have focused on confidence judgments made for single decisions. In three experiments, we investigate how these local confidence judgments relate and contribute to global confidence judgments, by which observers summarize their performance over a series of perceptual decisions. We report two main results. First, we find that participants exhibit more overconfidence in their local than in their global judgments of performance, an observation mirroring the aggregation effect in knowledge-based decisions. We further show that this effect is specific to confidence judgments and does not reflect a calculation bias. Second, we document a novel effect by which participants' global confidence is larger for sets which are more heterogeneous in terms of difficulty, even when actual performance is controlled for. Surprisingly, we find that this effect of variability also occurs at the level of local confidence judgments, in a manner that fully explains the effect at the global level. Overall, our results indicate that global confidence is based on local confidence, although these two processes can be partially dissociated. We discuss possible theoretical accounts to relate and empirical investigations of how observers develop and use a global sense of perceptual confidence. Public Significance Statement Most research about confidence has looked at people's confidence after making a single decision, neglecting the study of the overall sense of confidence experienced after making multiple decisions. Our study shows that people tend to be less overconfident when they evaluate their confidence after a series of decisions than after a single decision. We also show that this overall sense of confidence is partly based on the confidence expressed after each individual decision, and increases with the heterogeneity of the set of decisions.