Abstract
Asking subjects to rate their confidence is one of the oldest procedures in psychophysics. Remarkably, quantitative models of confidence ratings have been scarce. The Bayesian confidence hypothesis (BCH) states that an observer’s confidence rating is monotonically related to the posterior probability of their choice. I will report tests of this hypothesis in two visual categorization tasks: one requiring rapid categorization of a single oriented stimulus, the other a deliberative judgment typically made by scientists, namely interpreting scatterplots. We find evidence against the Bayesian confidence hypothesis in both tasks.
Keywords
visual decision-making, confidence, categorization
Session Number
04
Session Title
Theory
Start Date
14-5-2015 2:50 PM
End Date
14-5-2015 3:15 PM
Recommended Citation
Ma, Wei Ji and van den Berg, Ronald, "Testing the Bayesian confidence hypothesis" (2015). MODVIS Workshop. 3.
https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/modvis/2015/session04/3
Included in
Testing the Bayesian confidence hypothesis
Asking subjects to rate their confidence is one of the oldest procedures in psychophysics. Remarkably, quantitative models of confidence ratings have been scarce. The Bayesian confidence hypothesis (BCH) states that an observer’s confidence rating is monotonically related to the posterior probability of their choice. I will report tests of this hypothesis in two visual categorization tasks: one requiring rapid categorization of a single oriented stimulus, the other a deliberative judgment typically made by scientists, namely interpreting scatterplots. We find evidence against the Bayesian confidence hypothesis in both tasks.