Modelling visibility judgments using models of decision confidence

Abstract

How can we explain the regularities in subjective reports of human observers about their subjective visual experience of a stimulus? The present study tests if a recent model of decisional confidence, the weighted evidence and visibility model, can be generalized from confidence to subjective visibility. In a masked orientation identification task, observers reported the subjective visibility of the stimulus after each single identification response. Cognitive modelling revealed that the weighted evidence and visibility model provided a superior fit to the data compared to the standard signal detection model, the signal detection model with unsystematic noise superimposed on ratings, the postdecisional accumulation model, the two-channel model, the response-congruent evidence model, the two-dimensional Bayesian model, and the constant noise and decay model. A comparison between subjective visibility and decisional confidence revealed that visibility relied more on the strength of sensory evidence about features of the stimulus irrelevant to the identification judgment and less on evidence for the identification judgment. It is argued that at least two types of evidence are required to account for subjective visibility, one related to the identification judgment, and one related to the strength of stimulation.

Cognitive modelling reveals distinct electrophysiological markers of decision confidence and error monitoring

“…These findings are also consistent with a previous study showing that the ERN occur only when observers make erroneous responses to stimuli rated as "visible" (Charles et al, 2014(Charles et al, , 2013. Although we did not measure conscious awareness in the present study, we can extrapolate from other studies using the same task that observers' conscious percepts of the stimuli were degraded in shorter SOAs (Rausch & Zehetleitner, 2019a;Zehetleitner & Rausch, 2013); possibly, weakly conscious stimuli are not sufficient to trigger an ERN.…”

The folded X-pattern is not necessarily a statistical signature of decision confidence

“…Identifying correlates of confidence by a priori presupposing the folded X-pattern is not advisable because objective confidence may not show the expected properties. Likewise, it is also not advisable to infer the computational principles underlying observed confidence judgments based on statistical signatures alone, because various different models are able to recreate the folded X-pattern [26,28,29,32], just as the double increase pattern [26,32,40]. Importantly, both the folded X-pattern and the double increase pattern are compatible with Bayesian computation of confidence, which is why model fitting is necessary to ascertain which model is the generative model of the data [26].…”

Confidence in consciousness research

“…While some dissociations are observed (see Section 4), outcomes of confidence-based and visibility-based procedures generally correlate to a very large extent (Peters & Lau, 2015;Rausch et al 2021;Sandberg et al 2010;Zehetleitner & Rausch, 2013) (See Objection 4 for more radical dissociations). After comparing confidence-based and visibility-based procedures, Zehetleitner and Rausch (2013) concluded: "there was a considerable association between the two ratings that were required after each trial, indicating that the patterns of the ratings are quite similar" (p.1423).…”

“…For instance, pre-stimulus neuronal excitability leads to similar biases in confidence and visibility (Benwell et al 2017;Samaha et al 2017). Ultimately, the systems generating confidence and visibility judgments could simply be one and the same metacognitive system performing different computations over the same inputs (Fleming, 2019;Rausch et al 2021). Since whatever system generates visibility reports has to be consciousness-selective, this 14 I am not assuming that the prefrontal cortex is relevant for consciousness (See Malach (2022) and Michel (2022b) for reviews on this issue).…”