Lempert Karolina M, Chen Yu Lin, Fleming Stephen M
Department of Psychology, New York University, New York, New York, United States of America.
Center for Neural Science, New York University, New York, New York, United States of America; Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom.
PLoS One. 2015 May 7;10(5):e0126588. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0126588. eCollection 2015.
The sources of evidence contributing to metacognitive assessments of confidence in decision-making remain unclear. Previous research has shown that pupil dilation is related to the signaling of uncertainty in a variety of decision tasks. Here we ask whether pupil dilation is also related to metacognitive estimates of confidence. Specifically, we measure the relationship between pupil dilation and confidence during an auditory decision task using a general linear model approach to take into account delays in the pupillary response. We found that pupil dilation responses track the inverse of confidence before but not after a decision is made, even when controlling for stimulus difficulty. In support of an additional post-decisional contribution to the accuracy of confidence judgments, we found that participants with better metacognitive ability - that is, more accurate appraisal of their own decisions - showed a tighter relationship between post-decisional pupil dilation and confidence. Together our findings show that a physiological index of uncertainty, pupil dilation, predicts both confidence and metacognitive accuracy for auditory decisions.
有助于对决策信心进行元认知评估的证据来源仍不明确。先前的研究表明，瞳孔扩张与各种决策任务中的不确定性信号有关。在此，我们探讨瞳孔扩张是否也与信心的元认知估计有关。具体而言，我们在一项听觉决策任务中，使用一般线性模型方法来考虑瞳孔反应的延迟，测量瞳孔扩张与信心之间的关系。我们发现，即使在控制刺激难度的情况下，瞳孔扩张反应在做出决策之前而非之后跟踪信心的倒数。为支持对信心判断准确性的额外决策后贡献，我们发现具有更好元认知能力的参与者——即对自己决策的评估更准确——在决策后瞳孔扩张与信心之间表现出更紧密的关系。我们的研究结果共同表明，不确定性的生理指标瞳孔扩张，可预测听觉决策的信心和元认知准确性。
