MARIKA CONSTANT


Project

The Role of Priors in Confidence and Metacognitive Monitoring

In this project I aim to investigate how we metacognitively monitor different types of information, in particular, information from prior expectations versus incoming sensory information. I want to explore whether priors vs incoming information have different impacts on processing, both at the level of our first-order decisions, and at the level of our metacognition. Our expectations can give us useful information to optimize our decisions. However, are we less confident in cases when we have just as much information but some of this is based on prior expectations, instead of just the stimulus we are observing? Do we have just as efficient metacognitive access to the information from priors?

This will be investigated across a variety of tasks by manipulating prior expectations and exploring decision-making, confidence, and metacognitive ability. The combination of tasks, including both online and offline experiments, can also look at whether these potential effects depend on the particular form of prior. For example, do these effects differ if the prior is internally versus externally driven, high versus low level, utility-based versus probabilistic, or detection- versus discrimination-relevant? With behavioural analyses as well as a computational modeling approach, I aim to explore this.

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