ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2018
Humans incorporate attention-dependent uncertainty into perceptual decisions and confidence.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 50 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
50 citing papers in PubMed.
- Perceptual meta-uncertainty reveals enhanced calibration of sensory confidence in autism.Science advances · 2026Article
- Signatures proposed to index perceptual effects emerge in a purely cognitive task.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Article
- Visual confidence accurately tracks increasing internal noise with eccentricity in peripheral vision.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Using Artificial Neural Networks to Relate External Sensory Features to Internal Decisional Evidence.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2026Article
- Using artificial neural networks to reveal the human confidence computation.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Computational and Neuronal Basis of Visual Confidence.Annual review of vision science · 2025Review
- Task-relevant information availability shapes eye movements and perceptual judgment confidence.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Neural mechanisms of resource allocation in working memory.Science advances · 2025Article
- Suboptimal but intact integration of Bayesian components during perceptual decision-making in autism.Molecular autism · 2025Article
- Perceptual and attentional uncertainty impact global performance monitoring.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2025Article
- A novel behavioral paradigm reveals the nature of confidence computation in multi-alternative perceptual decision making.Research square · 2024Article
- Challenging the Bayesian confidence hypothesis in perceptual decision-making.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Confidence control for efficient behaviour in dynamic environments.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Audiovisual simultaneity windows reflect temporal sensory uncertainty.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2024Article
- A Bayesian inference model can predict the effects of attention on the serial dependence in heading estimation from optic flow.Journal of vision · 2024Article
- Dorsal pulvinar inactivation leads to spatial selection bias without perceptual deficit.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Influence of age and cognitive demand on motor decision making under uncertainty: a study on goal directed reaching movements.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- How do humans give confidence? A comprehensive comparison of process models of perceptual metacognition.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2024Article
- The future of metacognition research: Balancing construct breadth with measurement rigor.Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior · 2024Review
- Think twice: Re-assessing confidence improves visual metacognition.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Perceptual decisions are better when they take uncertainty into account. Uncertainty arises not only from the properties of sensory input but also from cognitive sources, such as different levels of attention. However, it is unknown whether humans appropriately adjust for such cognitive sources of uncertainty during perceptual decision-making. Here we show that, in a task in which uncertainty is relevant for performance, human categorization and confidence decisions take into account uncertainty related to attention. We manipulated uncertainty in an orientation categorization task from trial to trial using only an attentional cue. The categorization task was designed to disambiguate decision rules that did or did not depend on attention. Using formal model comparison to evaluate decision behavior, we found that category and confidence decision boundaries shifted as a function of attention in an approximately Bayesian fashion. This means that the observer's attentional state on each trial contributed probabilistically to the decision computation. This responsiveness of an observer's decisions to attention-dependent uncertainty should improve perceptual decisions in natural vision, in which attention is unevenly distributed across a scene.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.