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COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE

Uncertain perceptual confidence

Nature Human Behaviour volume 6, pages 179–180 (2022)Cite this article

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To interact safely with our environment, we must be able to judge our confidence in what we perceive. But what cues do we use to compute perceptual confidence? Geurts et al.1 decode brain activity and show that perceptual confidence is based on the distribution of sensory uncertainty, combining uncertainty driven by the input and the visual system.

Perceptual confidence is the evaluation of the validity of our own perceptual decisions. Trusting our own perceptions is important for a variety of daily tasks, such as detecting warning signals when we drive, discriminating familiar from nonfamiliar faces and deciding when to cross a busy road. The extent to which our perceptual confidence matches our perceptual performance is also critical for improving our perceptual skills and communicating with other individuals. In recent years, cognitive psychologists, neuroscientists and modellers have offered a wealth of evidence that humans are very efficient at making perceptual confidence judgments, sometimes almost as good as what would be expected from a theoretical algorithm that mimics an ideal observer who uses the same information for their perceptual decisions and confidence judgments. But the cues used by human observers to compute their confidence are still a matter of debate. A new study by Geurts and colleagues1 in Nature Human Behaviour now offers some insight into the nature of the information used to compute perceptual confidence.

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Fig. 1: Relationship between perceptual uncertainty and confidence in an orientation estimation task.

References

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  1. Laboratoire des systèmes perceptifs, Département d’études cognitives, École normale supérieure, PSL University, CNRS, Paris, France

    Pascal Mamassian

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  1. Pascal Mamassian
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Correspondence to Pascal Mamassian.

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Mamassian, P. Uncertain perceptual confidence. Nat Hum Behav 6, 179–180 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01248-9

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