Projects
Towards a mechanistic understanding of decision confidence. KU Leuven
Every day we have to make numerous decisions, often based on imperfect information. Some decisions are very important, for example deciding whether it is safe to cross a busy street. Our decisions are typically accompanied by a sense of confidence in having made the correct choice. Making accurate self-evaluations is of utter importance, because confidence can be used to adapt behavior. When having low confidence in the decision that it is ...
Using decision confidence for cognitive optimisation Ghent University
When making a decision, we experience a sense of confidence in the accuracy of this decision. It has been argued that confidence is used for cognitive optimisation (e.g., maximizing gains while minimizing costs), however, direct empirical evidence for this hypothesis is lacking. Inspired by Bayesian accounts, I propose that beliefs about which we are highly certain (i.e., in which we have high confidence) are more resistant to change than ...
Why does it feel good to be sure? A unifying framework of decision confidence and affect. KU Leuven
Confidence and affect tend to go hand-in-hand – being confident in something often feels positive and unconfident negative. This hints that affective states may have a role to play in metacognition and control in concert with confidence. However, the mere observation that confidence and affective valence tend to correlate does not prove that confidence itself is affective. This calls for a detailed analysis of mechanisms by which decision ...
Towards a mechanistic understanding of decision confidence KU Leuven
COnfident DEcisions KU Leuven
Virtually every decision people make comes with a sense of confidence – a subjective estimate of decision quality. The human capacity for confidence has tremendous social, clinical, and industrial impact. For example, children who can correctly judge their own level of confidence perform better academically. In the elderly, confidence declines faster than other cognitive functions. Clinically, confidence plays a key role in our understanding ...
It takes time to be confident: Implications of treating confidence as the result of an evidence accumulation process. KU Leuven
When making decisions in the absence of feedback, it is crucial to have good estimates of confidence in these decisions (high metacognitive accuracy) as this allows to effectively adapt behavior. State-of-the-art models of metacognitive accuracy typically ignore decision speed as they rely on static signal detection theory. Yet, key to understanding the computations underlying decision making is the speed at which decisions are taken, which ...
Towards a mechanistic understanding of confidence KU Leuven
When making a decision, we often experience a sense of confidence in the accuracy of that decision. Such metacognitive evaluation is of critical importance, because it allows to adapt behavior. In a first part of this project, I propose that humans learn to evaluate their own performance based on external feedback. This hypothesis has important consequences, as it provides a mechanistic understanding of how biases in confidence can emerge. In ...
Towards a mechanistic understanding of confidence KU Leuven
As humans are constantly making decisions, it is crucial to be able to evaluate the accuracy of our decision. This metacognitive capacity of estimating our decision confidence is commonly explained by assuming that a decision-maker computes the objective probability that their choice was correct. However, in practice we see that confidence often deviates from objective accuracy. Two striking examples of this are under- and overconfidence: The ...
How do I know that I know ? Towards a mechanistic understanding of confidence. KU Leuven
When making a decision, we are able to precisely estimate how confident we are in this decision, but how did we learn this self-evaluation skill in the first place ? Existing research on confidence has mostly focused on its nature, leaving the mechanisms of confidence almost uncharted territory. Using a modeling approach inspired by reinforcement learning, I investigate how humans learn to accurately self-evaluate their decisions, and what ...