ArticlePsychological review2021
The nature of metacognitive inefficiency in perceptual decision making.
Article in Psychological review, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 67 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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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.
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Who cites it
67 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 118 citations in OpenAlex.
- Across-subject correlation between confidence and accuracy: A meta-analysis of the Confidence Database.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2022Pooled it
- Trial-by-trial fluctuations in decision criterion shape confidence.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- Metacognition and metacognitive monitoring in aging.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2026Review
- Stimulus reliability but not boundary distance manipulations violate the folded-X pattern of confidence.Cognition · 2026Article
- Adaptive yet suboptimal integration of advice in decision-making.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- dynConfiR: An R package for sequential sampling models of decision confidence.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- Macaque Area LIP Reflects Confidence-Dependent Changes in Decision Policy.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Type-1 and type-2 decisions feature computational noise of similar magnitude.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- Metacognitive efficiency in learned value-based choice.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Prediction of uncertain visual trajectories is biased toward motion continuity.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2026Article
- Perceptual confidence has near perfect access to the existence of discrete representations, but only weak access to precision.Cognition · 2026Article
- Visual confidence accurately tracks increasing internal noise with eccentricity in peripheral vision.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Building worlds of your own: the functional role of metacognitive bias in metacognition.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Confidence in naturalistic decision making.Neuroscience of consciousness · 2026Article
- Blaming luck, claiming skill: Self-attribution bias in error assignment.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Bits of confidence: Metacognition as uncertainty reduction.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Review
- Switching the motor response weakens confidence serial dependence.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Article
- Using artificial neural networks to reveal the human confidence computation.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- No Central Executive? Decision Formation Through Multi-Area Population Dynamics.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Review
- Computational and Neuronal Basis of Visual Confidence.Annual review of vision science · 2025Review
7 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Humans have the metacognitive ability to judge the accuracy of their own decisions via confidence ratings. A substantial body of research has demonstrated that human metacognition is fallible but it remains unclear how metacognitive inefficiency should be incorporated into a mechanistic model of confidence generation. Here we show that, contrary to what is typically assumed, metacognitive inefficiency depends on the level of confidence. We found that, across 5 different data sets and 4 different measures of metacognition, metacognitive ability decreased with higher confidence ratings. To understand the nature of this effect, we collected a large dataset of 20 subjects completing 2,800 trials each and providing confidence ratings on a continuous scale. The results demonstrated a robustly nonlinear zROC curve with downward curvature, despite a decades-old assumption of linearity. This pattern of results was reproduced by a new mechanistic model of confidence generation, which assumes the existence of lognormally distributed metacognitive noise. The model outperformed competing models either lacking metacognitive noise altogether or featuring Gaussian metacognitive noise. Further, the model could generate a measure of metacognitive ability which was independent of confidence levels. These findings establish an empirically validated model of confidence generation, have significant implications about measures of metacognitive ability, and begin to reveal the underlying nature of metacognitive inefficiency. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).
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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.