Fechner's law in metacognition: A quantitative model of visual working memory confidence.

ABSTRACT: Although visual working memory (VWM) has been studied extensively, it is unknown how people form confidence judgments about their memories. Peirce (1878) speculated that Fechner's law-which states that sensation is proportional to the logarithm of stimulus intensity-might apply to confidence reports. Based on this idea, we hypothesize that humans map the precision of their VWM contents to a confidence rating through Fechner's law. We incorporate this hypothesis into the best available model of VWM encoding and fit it to data from a delayed-estimation experiment. The model provides an excellent account of human confidence rating distributions as well as the relation between performance and confidence. Moreover, the best-fitting mapping in a model with a highly flexible mapping closely resem

SUBMITTER: van den Berg R 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5321570 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature