Sources of confidence judgments in implicit cognition

Abstract

Subjective reports of confidence are frequently used as a measure of awareness in a variety of fields, including artificial grammar learning. However, little is known about what information is used to make confidence judgments and whether there are any possible sources of information used to discriminate between items that are unrelated to confidence. The data reported here replicate an earlier experiment by Vokey and Brooks (1992) and show that grammaticality decisions are based on both the grammatical status of items and their similarity to study exemplars. The key finding is that confidence ratings made on a continuous scale (50%-100%) are closely related to grammaticality but are unrelated to all of the measures of similarity that were tested. By contrast, confidence ratings made on a binary scale (high vs. low) are related to both grammaticality and similarity. The data confirm an earlier finding (Tunney & Shanks, 2003) that binary confidence ratings are more sensitive to low levels of awareness than continuous ratings are and suggest that participants are conscious of all the information acquired in artificial grammar learning.

Episodic and prototype models of category learning

“…But if participants have structural knowledge of the category, then the information used to make confidence ratings should be the same as that used to categorize items. Tunney (2005) demonstrated that confidence ratings are closely related to structural knowledge in artificial grammar learning and could be used to discriminate between competing theories of categorization. Because confidence ratings were closely related to the similarity of the test items to the study items, but not the rules of the grammar, Tunney concluded that the categorization in artificial grammar learning was based on explicit memory for exemplars rather than rule abstraction.…”

“…Subjective reports of confidence are a common means to assess levels of implicit and explicit knowledge in other category learning paradigms such as artificial grammar learning (Dienes et al 1995;Tunney 2005Tunney , 2010, along with decision-making (Juslin et al 2000), perception (Kunimoto et al 2001), and memory (Henson et al 2000), but have yet to be applied to prototype distortion tasks.…”

The role of proficiency and working memory in gender and number agreement processing in L1 and L2 Spanish

“…Only confidence ratings of sentences with correct grammaticality judgments were used for statistical analyses, and the ratings were included because previous studies have shown that multiple judgment tasks are more informative than single judgment tasks (Schü tze, 1996) and that confidence ratings made on a continuous scale are closely related to grammaticality (Tunney, 2005). Furthermore, the combination of grammaticality and confidence judgments allowed us to differentiate between performance (accuracy score and source of the error score) and awareness (confidence score) (Tunney and Shanks, 2003).…”

The conscious, the unconscious, and familiarity.

“…There has been considerable evidence that judgments are guided by knowledge of fragments, or chunks, of the training strings (Dulany, Carlson, & Dewey, 1984;Perruchet & Pacteau, 1990;Servan Schreiber & Anderson, 1990). Tunney (2005) further showed that the extent of these structural similarities predicted participants' confidence in their grammaticality judgments. Later studies have shown that performance is strongly predicted by the frequency with which such fragments are seen during training (Johnstone & Shanks, 2001;Knowlton & Squire, 1994).…”