3
views
0
recommends
+1 Recommend
0 collections
    0
    shares
      • Record: found
      • Abstract: found
      • Article: found
      Is Open Access

      Confidence boosts serial dependence in orientation estimation

      research-article

      Read this article at

      Bookmark
          There is no author summary for this article yet. Authors can add summaries to their articles on ScienceOpen to make them more accessible to a non-specialist audience.

          Abstract

          In the absence of external feedback, a decision maker must rely on a subjective estimate of their decision accuracy in order to appropriately guide behavior. Normative models of perceptual decision-making relate subjective estimates of internal signal quality (e.g., confidence) directly to the internal signal quality itself, thereby making it unknowable whether the subjective estimate or the underlying signal is what drives behavior. We constructed stimuli that dissociated the human observer's performance on a visual estimation task from their subjective estimates of confidence in their performance, thus violating normative principles. To understand whether confidence influences future decision-making, we examined serial dependence in observer's responses, a phenomenon whereby the estimate of a stimulus on the current trial can be biased toward the stimulus from the previous trial. We found that when decisions were made with high confidence, they conferred stronger biases upon the following trial, suggesting that confidence may enhance serial dependence. Critically, this finding was true also when confidence was experimentally dissociated from task performance, indicating that subjective confidence, independent of signal quality, can amplify serial dependence. These findings demonstrate an effect of confidence on future behavior, independent of task performance, and suggest that perceptual decisions incorporate recent history in an uncertainty-weighted manner, but where the uncertainty carried forward is a subjectively estimated and possibly suboptimal readout of objective sensory uncertainty.

          Related collections

          Most cited references44

          • Record: found
          • Abstract: found
          • Article: not found

          Normalization of cell responses in cat striate cortex.

          D. Heeger (1992)
          Simple cells in the striate cortex have been depicted as half-wave-rectified linear operators. Complex cells have been depicted as energy mechanisms, constructed from the squared sum of the outputs of quadrature pairs of linear operators. However, the linear/energy model falls short of a complete explanation of striate cell responses. In this paper, a modified version of the linear/energy model is presented in which striate cells mutually inhibit one another, effectively normalizing their responses with respect to stimulus contrast. This paper reviews experimental measurements of striate cell responses, and shows that the new model explains a significantly larger body of physiological data.
            Bookmark
            • Record: found
            • Abstract: found
            • Article: not found

            Neural correlates, computation and behavioural impact of decision confidence.

            Humans and other animals must often make decisions on the basis of imperfect evidence. Statisticians use measures such as P values to assign degrees of confidence to propositions, but little is known about how the brain computes confidence estimates about decisions. We explored this issue using behavioural analysis and neural recordings in rats in combination with computational modelling. Subjects were trained to perform an odour categorization task that allowed decision confidence to be manipulated by varying the distance of the test stimulus to the category boundary. To understand how confidence could be computed along with the choice itself, using standard models of decision-making, we defined a simple measure that quantified the quality of the evidence contributing to a particular decision. Here we show that the firing rates of many single neurons in the orbitofrontal cortex match closely to the predictions of confidence models and cannot be readily explained by alternative mechanisms, such as learning stimulus-outcome associations. Moreover, when tested using a delayed reward version of the task, we found that rats' willingness to wait for rewards increased with confidence, as predicted by the theoretical model. These results indicate that confidence estimates, previously suggested to require 'metacognition' and conscious awareness are available even in the rodent brain, can be computed with relatively simple operations, and can drive adaptive behaviour. We suggest that confidence estimation may be a fundamental and ubiquitous component of decision-making.
              Bookmark
              • Record: found
              • Abstract: found
              • Article: not found

              Serial dependence in visual perception

              Visual input often arrives in a noisy and discontinuous stream, owing to head and eye movements, occlusion, lighting changes, and many other factors. Yet the physical world is generally stable—objects and physical characteristics rarely change spontaneously. How then does the human visual system capitalize on continuity in the physical environment over time? Here we show that visual perception is serially dependent, using both prior and present input to inform perception at the present moment. Using an orientation judgment task, we found that even when visual input changes randomly over time, perceived orientation is strongly and systematically biased toward recently seen stimuli. Further, the strength of this bias is modulated by attention and tuned to the spatial and temporal proximity of successive stimuli. These results reveal a serial dependence in perception characterized by a spatiotemporally tuned, orientation-selective operator—which we call a continuity field—that may promote visual stability over time.
                Bookmark

                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Journal
                J Vis
                J Vis
                jovi
                J Vis
                JOVI
                Journal of Vision
                The Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology
                1534-7362
                2019
                22 April 2019
                : 19
                : 4
                : 25
                Affiliations
                jsamaha@ 123456ucsc.edu
                [1]University of California, Santa Cruz, Department of Psychology, Santa Cruz, CA
                [2]University of Wisconsin–Madison, Department of Psychology, Madison, WI
                [3]University of Wisconsin-Madison, Department of Psychology, Madison, WI
                [4]University of Wisconsin-Madison, Department of Psychology and Department of Psychiatry, Madison, WI
                Article
                jovi-19-04-12 JOV-06388-2018
                10.1167/19.4.25
                6690400
                31009526
                1a201908-7946-44db-9805-41c20bc9d2dd
                Copyright 2019 The Authors

                This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

                History
                : 24 July 2018
                : 3 February 2019
                Categories
                Article

                confidence,serial dependence,decision-making,metacognition,population code

                Comments

                Comment on this article