Decision Neuroscience Lab, Department of Health Sciences and Technology, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.
Neuroscience Center Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.
Nat Commun. 2021 Dec 17;12(1):7337. doi: 10.1038/s41467-021-27618-5.
Confidence, the subjective estimate of decision quality, is a cognitive process necessary for learning from mistakes and guiding future actions. The origins of confidence judgments resulting from economic decisions remain unclear. We devise a task and computational framework that allowed us to formally tease apart the impact of various sources of confidence in value-based decisions, such as uncertainty emerging from encoding and decoding operations, as well as the interplay between gaze-shift dynamics and attentional effort. In line with canonical decision theories, trial-to-trial fluctuations in the precision of value encoding impact economic choice consistency. However, this uncertainty has no influence on confidence reports. Instead, confidence is associated with endogenous attentional effort towards choice alternatives and down-stream noise in the comparison process. These findings provide an explanation for confidence (miss)attributions in value-guided behaviour, suggesting mechanistic influences of endogenous attentional states for guiding decisions and metacognitive awareness of choice certainty.
信心是对决策质量的主观估计，是从错误中学习和指导未来行动的认知过程。经济决策产生的信心判断的起源尚不清楚。我们设计了一个任务和计算框架，使我们能够正式区分基于价值的决策中各种信心来源的影响，例如来自编码和解码操作的不确定性，以及注视转移动态和注意力努力之间的相互作用。与典型的决策理论一致，值编码精度的试验间波动会影响经济选择的一致性。然而，这种不确定性对信心报告没有影响。相反，信心与对选择替代方案的内源性注意力努力以及比较过程中的下游噪声有关。这些发现为价值引导行为中的信心（错误）归因提供了解释，表明内源性注意状态对指导决策和对选择确定性的元认知意识的机制影响。
