September 2024
Volume 24, Issue 10
Open Access
Vision Sciences Society Annual Meeting Abstract  |   September 2024
Different stimulus manipulations produce dissociable confidence-accuracy relationships
Author Affiliations & Notes
  • Herrick Fung
    Georgia Institute of Technology
  • Dobromir Rahnev
    Georgia Institute of Technology
  • Footnotes
    Acknowledgements  This work was supported by the National Institute of Health (award: R01MH119189) and the Office of Naval Research (award: N00014-20-1-2622).
Journal of Vision September 2024, Vol.24, 399. doi:https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.24.10.399
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      Herrick Fung, Dobromir Rahnev; Different stimulus manipulations produce dissociable confidence-accuracy relationships. Journal of Vision 2024;24(10):399. https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.24.10.399.

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      © ARVO (1962-2015); The Authors (2016-present)

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Abstract

A central goal in visual metacognition is to uncover the underlying computations that give rise to our sense of subjective confidence. Achieving this goal necessitates an understanding of how confidence changes in response to various manipulations. However, existing studies have predominately relied on a single stimulus manipulation under the tacit assumption that different manipulations are likely to have equivalent effects on confidence. Here, we test this assumption by including four distinct stimulus manipulations within a single experiment. Subjects judged the orientation (clockwise vs. counterclockwise from 45°) of Gabor patches. The stimuli varied in (1) size (2.5, 5, and 7.5° visual angle), (2) duration (33, 100, and 500 ms), (3) noise contrast (.1, .75, and .9), and (4) orientation (T/2, T, 2T, where T is the individualized threshold obtained by a staircase procedure). We found that the four manipulations produced vastly different effects on accuracy and confidence. Specifically, the size and noise contrast manipulations had a small effect on accuracy but a substantial effect on confidence. Conversely, the orientation manipulation greatly affected accuracy but had only a modest influence on confidence. The orientation manipulation stood out in yet another aspect: it was the only manipulation for which confidence for incorrect trials was higher for the more difficult compared to the easier conditions. The remaining three manipulations exhibited the opposite pattern. We speculate that these effects were driven by orientation being the only manipulation not immediately obvious to the observers. These results clearly demonstrate that different stimulus manipulations yield extensive differences in the confidence-accuracy relationship. Our findings challenge prominent models of confidence that assume a single, stereotypical relationship between confidence and accuracy.

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