Sources of confidence in value-based choice

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. The authors show that metacognitive awareness of choice certainty is closely linked to endogenous attentional states that guide decision behaviour.

Automated summary

The study reveals that confidence in value-based decisions is influenced by endogenous attentional effort and downstream noise in the comparison process, rather than by fluctuations in the precision of value encoding.