Departmental Colloquium: Pascal Mamassian, Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris: Visual confidence in perceptional decision making

Pascal Mamassian
CNRS and Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, France

Visual confidence refers to our ability to predict the correctness of our perceptual decisions. Knowing the limits of this ability, both in terms of biases (e.g. overconfidence) and sensitivity (e.g. blindsight), is clearly important to approach a full picture of perceptual decision making. The measurement of visual confidence with the classical method of confidence ratings presents both advantages and disadvantages. In recent years, we have explored an alternative paradigm based on confidence forced-choice. In this paradigm, observers have to choose which of two perceptual decisions is more likely to be correct. I will review some behavioural results obtained with the confidence forced-choice paradigm. I will also present two ideal observers based on signal detection theory, one that uses the same information for perceptual and confidence decisions, and another one that has access to additional information for confidence. These ideal observers help us quantify the limitations of human confidence estimation.