Awareness and confidence in perceptual decision-making

Abstract

Perceptual decision-making employs a range of higher order metacognitive processes. Two of the most important of these are perceptual awareness; or the clarity with which one reports seeing a perceptual stimulus, and response confidence; or the certainty one has about the correctness of one's own perceptual categorizations. We used a novel false feedback paradigm to investigate the relationships between these two processes. We asked people to perform a standard psychophysical detection task. We used feedback to selectively intervene either on our participants’ trust in their own perceptual awareness of the stimulus, or on their confidence in their own responses. We measured the effects of these interventions on response accuracy; on reports of perceptual awareness; and on response confidence. We found that by undermining people's trust in their awareness of the sensory stimulus, we could reliably reduce their accuracy on the task. We suggest that the reason this occurred is that people came to rely less on evidence from their senses when making perceptual decisions. We conclude by suggesting that there is a not a one-to-one mapping between content in conscious experience and how that content is used in perceptual decision making, and that one's perception of the reliability of content also plays a role.

Statement of Significance

This paper explores how different kinds of metacognitive state are related to one another and to perceptual decision making. Our focus is on the states of metacognitive confidence and perceptual awareness. We examine how an intervention on the reliability of these states influences performance in a perceptual detection task. We also examine how the intervention influences reports of the states themselves. The intervention we use is false feedback. For one group of participants, we tell them their perceptual judgement is wrong whenever they report they are uncertain in their choice (confidence intervention). For another group, we tell them their judgement is wrong whenever they report that their experience of the stimulus is unclear (awareness intervention). We find that both interventions reduce the accuracy of people's judgements, but that the awareness intervention is more effective. Also, we find that only the awareness intervention reduces reports of both metacognitive confidence in the response, and awareness of the stimuli. The confidence intervention does not influence either metacognitive state. These results suggest that we should understand confidence and awareness as separate higher level cognitive states, and that we should understand awareness as having a stronger causal role than confidence in perception and performance.