Talk abstracts > Tarryn Balsdon (University of Glasgow)

Go back to Homepage.

Tarryn Balsdon - University of Glasgow

Friday, June 2^nd

Talk Session 3: Electrophysiology of decision-making

11h30 - 12h

Confidence and perceptual decision-making in dynamic sensory environments

Perceptual decisions come with a feeling of confidence that reflects decision accuracy. Rather than a post-decision reflection, we show separable EEG representations of confidence online, during decision-making. This online confidence could be used to control decision efficiency by guiding when we commit to decisions. In dynamic sensory environments, where the quality of the evidence changes over time, observers could use their confidence to down-weight low-quality sensory evidence or capitalise on high-quality evidence. We use computational modelling to capture this adaptive behaviour with a double-integration framework. This model proposes that confidence controls the leak of a secondary, motor accumulator, which integrates the already accumulated evidence to determine the final choice. We isolate EEG signatures of these two concurrent integration processes and relate them to post-decision confidence ratings. Together, this suggests that perceptual decisions are orchestrated by a collaboration of sensory, motor, and metacognitive processes, to arbitrate the efficiency of decision commitment.