Evidence or Confidence: What Is Really Monitored during a Decision?

ABSTRACT: Assessing our confidence in the choices we make is important to making adaptive decisions, and it is thus no surprise that we excel in this ability. However, standard models of decision-making, such as the drift-diffusion model (DDM), treat confidence assessment as a post hoc or parallel process that does not directly influence the choice, which depends only on accumulated evidence. Here, we pursue the alternative hypothesis that what is monitored during a decision is an evolving sense of confidence (that the to-be-selected option is the best) rather than raw evidence. Monitoring confidence has the appealing consequence that the decision threshold corresponds to a desired level of confidence for the choice, and that confidence improvements can be traded off against the resources required t

SUBMITTER: Lee DG 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10482769 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature