Ernst Strüngmann Institute (ESI) for Neuroscience in cooperation with Max Planck Society, Frankfurt, Germany.
Institute of Medical Psychology, Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
Sci Rep. 2017 Jul 25;7(1):6431. doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-06715-w.
Spatial attention allows us to make more accurate decisions about events in our environment. Decision confidence is thought to be intimately linked to the decision making process as confidence ratings are tightly coupled to decision accuracy. While both spatial attention and decision confidence have been subjected to extensive research, surprisingly little is known about the interaction between these two processes. Since attention increases performance it might be expected that confidence would also increase. However, two studies investigating the effects of endogenous attention on decision confidence found contradictory results. Here we investigated the effects of two distinct forms of spatial attention on decision confidence; endogenous attention and exogenous attention. We used an orientation-matching task, comparing the two attention conditions (endogenous and exogenous) to a control condition without directed attention. Participants performed better under both attention conditions than in the control condition. Higher confidence ratings than the control condition were found under endogenous attention but not under exogenous attention. This finding suggests that while attention can increase confidence ratings, it must be voluntarily deployed for this increase to take place. We discuss possible implications of this relative overconfidence found only during endogenous attention with respect to the theoretical background of decision confidence.
空间注意使我们能够更准确地做出关于环境中事件的决策。决策信心被认为与决策过程密切相关，因为置信度评分与决策准确性紧密相关。虽然空间注意和决策信心都受到了广泛的研究，但人们对这两个过程之间的相互作用知之甚少。由于注意可以提高性能，因此可以预期信心也会增加。然而，两项研究调查了内源性注意对决策信心的影响，结果却相互矛盾。在这里，我们研究了两种不同形式的空间注意对决策信心的影响：内源性注意和外源性注意。我们使用了一种定向匹配任务，将两种注意条件（内源性和外源性）与无定向注意的控制条件进行比较。与控制条件相比，参与者在两种注意条件下的表现都更好。与控制条件相比，内源性注意下的置信度评分更高，但在外源性注意下则没有。这一发现表明，虽然注意可以提高置信度评分，但这种提高必须是自愿的。我们讨论了仅在内源性注意期间发现的这种相对过度自信的可能性，以及它与决策信心的理论背景的关系。
