Abstract
Confidence refers to our ability to evaluate the validity of our own performance and there are multiple benefits of successful estimates. In particular, reliable confidence could be used as an internal feedback signal to update our model of the world. In perception, confidence sensitivity can be relatively high, and in some visual tasks, as high as one would predict from the ideal confidence observer. We tested whether these perceptual results would generalize to two visuo-motor conditions. In the first condition, participants used their hand to track the center of a cloud of dots that followed an unpredictable horizontal trajectory. After tracking for several seconds, they reported their confidence as being better or worse than their average performance. The analysis of these confidence judgments indicated that participants were able to monitor their tracking performance, but not optimally. We replicated this manual tracking task in a second condition where participants had to track the cloud of dots with their eyes. Here again, confidence sensitivity was above chance, but barely so. Overall, it appears that human participants have only limited access to their visuo-motor performance, and they are comparatively worse than for purely visual tasks. This limitation might reflect the cost of fast and accurate visuo-motor tracking.