Delineating the relationship between perceptual decision-making and confidence evaluation

Although in everyday life knowing what we perceive feels simple and automatic, the process of inferring the causes of the sensory signals that reach our brains rely on sophisticated inferential processes that are fraught with uncertainty. How does the brain monitor the level of uncertainty and take it into account to optimize decision-making? Find out more from Dr Tarryn Balsdon.

Perceptual decisions come with a feeling of confidence that the reflects the likelihood that the decision is correct. Confidence is often studied as a post-decisional evaluation of the decision evidence.

We examined the relationship between confidence and decision evidence in a protracted decision-making task, where the observer has to make a categorical decision over a sequence of multiple stimuli. We exploit the tendency of observers to make their perceptual decisions before the end of the stimulus sequence to delineate the computational and neural processes associated with ongoing evaluations of confidence.

Our findings suggest that the confidence is continually evaluated throughout the process of making a perceptual decision, relying on partially dissociable processes. This constant monitoring is not redundant, but could be used to control when we commit to our decisions.