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Annual Review of Psychology Jan 2024Determining the psychological, computational, and neural bases of confidence and uncertainty holds promise for understanding foundational aspects of human metacognition.... (Review)
Review
Determining the psychological, computational, and neural bases of confidence and uncertainty holds promise for understanding foundational aspects of human metacognition. While a neuroscience of confidence has focused on the mechanisms underpinning subpersonal phenomena such as representations of uncertainty in the visual or motor system, metacognition research has been concerned with personal-level beliefs and knowledge about self-performance. I provide a road map for bridging this divide by focusing on a particular class of confidence computation: propositional confidence in one's own (hypothetical) decisions or actions. Propositional confidence is informed by the observer's models of the world and their cognitive system, which may be more or less accurate-thus explaining why metacognitive judgments are inferential and sometimes diverge from task performance. Disparate findings on the neural basis of uncertainty and performance monitoring are integrated into a common framework, and a new understanding of the locus of action of metacognitive interventions is developed.
Topics: Humans; Metacognition; Judgment
PubMed: 37722748
DOI: 10.1146/annurev-psych-022423-032425 -
Psychonomic Bulletin & Review Aug 2021Visual confidence is the observers' estimate of their precision in one single perceptual decision. Ultimately, however, observers often need to judge their confidence...
Visual confidence is the observers' estimate of their precision in one single perceptual decision. Ultimately, however, observers often need to judge their confidence over a task in general rather than merely on one single decision. Here, we measured the global confidence acquired across multiple perceptual decisions. Participants performed a dual task on two series of oriented stimuli. The perceptual task was an orientation-discrimination judgment. The metacognitive task was a global confidence judgment: observers chose the series for which they felt they had performed better in the perceptual task. We found that choice accuracy in global confidence judgments improved as the number of items in the series increased, regardless of whether the global confidence judgment was made before (prospective) or after (retrospective) the perceptual decisions. This result is evidence that global confidence judgment was based on an integration of confidence information across multiple perceptual decisions rather than on a single one. Furthermore, we found a tendency for global confidence choices to be influenced by response times, and more so for recent perceptual decisions than earlier ones in the series of stimuli. Using model comparison, we found that global confidence is well described as a combination of noisy estimates of sensory evidence and position-weighted response-time evidence. In summary, humans can integrate information across multiple decisions to estimate global confidence, but this integration is not optimal, in particular because of biases in the use of response-time information.
Topics: Decision Making; Humans; Judgment; Metacognition; Prospective Studies; Reaction Time; Retrospective Studies; Visual Perception
PubMed: 33768504
DOI: 10.3758/s13423-020-01869-7 -
American Journal of Pharmaceutical... Apr 2023To explore the relationship between a multiple mini-interview (MMI) and situational judgment test (SJT) designed to evaluate nonacademic constructs. A 30-question...
To explore the relationship between a multiple mini-interview (MMI) and situational judgment test (SJT) designed to evaluate nonacademic constructs. A 30-question ranked-item SJT was developed to test three constructs also measured by MMIs during a pharmacy school's admissions process. First-year pharmacy students were invited to complete the SJT in fall 2020. One hundred four students took the SJT (82.5% response rate), with 97 (77% of possible participants) having MMI scores from the admissions process. Descriptive statistics and other statistical analyses were used to explore the psychometric properties of the SJT and its relationship to MMI scores. Seventy-four percent of students identified as female (n=72), and 11.3% identified with an underrepresented racial identity (n=11). The average age, in mean (SD), was 21.8 (2.1) years. Students' mean (SD) scores were 85.5 (3.1) (out of 100 points) on the SJT and 6.1 (1.0) (out of 10 points) on the MMI. Principal components analysis indicated that the SJT lacked construct validity and internal reliability. However, reliability of the entire SJT instrument provided support for using the total SJT score for analysis (α=.63). Correlations between total SJT and MMI scores were weak ( <0.29). Results of this study suggest that an SJT may not be a good replacement for the MMI to measure distinct constructs during the admissions process. However, the SJT may provide useful supplemental information during admissions or as part of formative feedback once students are enrolled in a program.
Topics: Humans; Female; School Admission Criteria; Judgment; Reproducibility of Results; Education, Pharmacy; Psychometrics
PubMed: 35953105
DOI: 10.5688/ajpe9058 -
PloS One 2022Unobservable mechanisms that tie causes to their effects generate observable events. How can one make inferences about hidden causal structures? This paper introduces...
Unobservable mechanisms that tie causes to their effects generate observable events. How can one make inferences about hidden causal structures? This paper introduces the domain-matching heuristic to explain how humans perform causal reasoning when lacking mechanistic knowledge. We posit that people reduce the otherwise vast space of possible causal relations by focusing only on the likeliest ones. When thinking about a cause, people tend to think about possible effects that participate in the same domain, and vice versa. To explore the specific domains that people use, we asked people to cluster artifacts. The analyses revealed three commonly employed mechanism domains: the mechanical, chemical, and electromagnetic. Using these domains, we tested the domain-matching heuristic by testing adults' and children's causal attribution, prediction, judgment, and subjective understanding. We found that people's responses conform with domain-matching. These results provide evidence for a heuristic that explains how people engage in causal reasoning without directly appealing to mechanistic or probabilistic knowledge.
Topics: Adult; Causality; Child; Humans; Judgment; Problem Solving; Social Perception; Thinking
PubMed: 35560140
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0268219 -
Vision Research Feb 2022It was recently proposed that both experience-driven and object-based perceptual grouping contribute to holistic face processing. We investigated whether motion-as a...
It was recently proposed that both experience-driven and object-based perceptual grouping contribute to holistic face processing. We investigated whether motion-as a common fate perceptual grouping cue-could enhance the holistic processing of misaligned faces. We manipulated alignment and motion (dynamic and static) of study and test faces in a modified complete composite task in which the congruency effect was regarded as an indicator of holistic processing. Participants made same-different judgments about the top halves of two sequentially presented composite faces. We observed that when the study faces were dynamic, regardless of whether the test faces were dynamic or static, misaligned-misaligned face pairs were processed holistically. When the study faces were static, misaligned-misaligned face pairs showed no holistic processing, and neither did inverted faces. These results indicate that motion can promote the holistic processing of misaligned faces. Our findings provide important insights into different types of holistic face processing, and we discuss these types as well as their relationships with each other in depth.
Topics: Facial Recognition; Humans; Judgment; Motion; Orientation, Spatial
PubMed: 34784566
DOI: 10.1016/j.visres.2021.107970 -
Proceedings of the National Academy of... Apr 2022The diversity of human faces and the contexts in which they appear gives rise to an expansive stimulus space over which people infer psychological traits (e.g.,...
The diversity of human faces and the contexts in which they appear gives rise to an expansive stimulus space over which people infer psychological traits (e.g., trustworthiness or alertness) and other attributes (e.g., age or adiposity). Machine learning methods, in particular deep neural networks, provide expressive feature representations of face stimuli, but the correspondence between these representations and various human attribute inferences is difficult to determine because the former are high-dimensional vectors produced via black-box optimization algorithms. Here we combine deep generative image models with over 1 million judgments to model inferences of more than 30 attributes over a comprehensive latent face space. The predictive accuracy of our model approaches human interrater reliability, which simulations suggest would not have been possible with fewer faces, fewer judgments, or lower-dimensional feature representations. Our model can be used to predict and manipulate inferences with respect to arbitrary face photographs or to generate synthetic photorealistic face stimuli that evoke impressions tuned along the modeled attributes.
Topics: Attitude; Face; Facial Expression; Humans; Judgment; Social Perception; Trust
PubMed: 35446619
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2115228119 -
The Journals of Gerontology. Series B,... Jun 2023Recent studies support the idea of an intent-to-outcome shift in moral judgments with age. We further assessed whether a reduced reliance on intentions is associated...
OBJECTIVES
Recent studies support the idea of an intent-to-outcome shift in moral judgments with age. We further assessed whether a reduced reliance on intentions is associated with aging in a preregistered study with 73 younger (20-41 years) and 79 older (70-84 years) adults, group-matched on education level.
METHOD
Participants were presented with a set of moral cases to evaluate, created by varying orthogonally the valence (neutral, negative) of the information regarding the agent's intentions and the action's outcomes.
RESULTS
The two age groups did not differ in the extent they relied on intentions in moral judgment.
DISCUSSION
These results suggest that an intent-to-outcome shift might not be found in all aging populations, challenging prevailing theories suggesting that aging is necessarily associated with a reduced reliance on intentions.
Topics: Humans; Intention; Judgment; Morals
PubMed: 35973063
DOI: 10.1093/geronb/gbac114 -
The Journal of Nutrition Jun 2021
Topics: Exanthema; Folic Acid; Humans; Hypersensitivity; Infant; Judgment
PubMed: 33877314
DOI: 10.1093/jn/nxab084 -
Behavioral Neuroscience Oct 2022Recent primate studies suggest a potential link between pupil size and subjectively elapsed duration. Here, we sought to investigate the relationship between pupil size...
Recent primate studies suggest a potential link between pupil size and subjectively elapsed duration. Here, we sought to investigate the relationship between pupil size and perceived duration in human participants performing two temporal bisection tasks in the subsecond and suprasecond interval ranges. In the subsecond task, pupil diameter was greater during stimulus processing when shorter intervals were overestimated but also during and after stimulus offset when longer intervals were underestimated. By contrast, in the suprasecond task, larger pupil diameter was observed only in the late stimulus offset phase prior to response prompts when longer intervals were underestimated. This pattern of results suggests that pupil diameter relates to an error monitoring mechanism in interval timing. These results are at odds with a direct relationship between pupil size and the perception of duration but suggest that pupillometric variation might play a key role in signifying errors related to temporal judgments. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).
Topics: Animals; Humans; Judgment
PubMed: 36222640
DOI: 10.1037/bne0000533 -
Cognitive Research: Principles and... Dec 2022Metacognition plays a role in environment learning (EL). When navigating, we monitor environment information to judge our likelihood to remember our way, and we engage... (Review)
Review
Metacognition plays a role in environment learning (EL). When navigating, we monitor environment information to judge our likelihood to remember our way, and we engage in control by using tools to prevent getting lost. Yet, the relationship between metacognition and EL is understudied. In this paper, we examine the possibility of leveraging metacognition to support EL. However, traditional metacognitive theories and methodologies were not developed with EL in mind. Here, we use traditional metacognitive theories and approaches as a foundation for a new examination of metacognition in EL. We highlight three critical considerations about EL. Namely: (1) EL is a complex process that unfolds sequentially and is thereby enriched with multiple different types of cues, (2) EL is inherently driven by a series of ecologically relevant motivations and constraints, and (3) monitoring and control interact to support EL. In doing so, we describe how task demands and learning motivations inherent to EL should shape how metacognition is explored. With these considerations, we provide three methodological recommendations for investigating metacognition during EL. Specifically, researchers should: (1) instantiate EL goals to impact learning, metacognition, and retrieval processes, (2) prompt learners to make frequent metacognitive judgments and consider metacognitive accuracy as a primary performance metric, and (3) incorporate insights from both transfer appropriate processing and monitoring hypotheses when designing EL assessments. In summary, to effectively investigate how metacognition impacts EL, both ecological and methodological considerations need to be weighed.
Topics: Metacognition; Learning; Judgment; Cues
PubMed: 36575318
DOI: 10.1186/s41235-022-00454-x