Each perceptual decision is commonly attached to a judgment of confidence in the uncertainty of that decision. Confidence is classically defined as the estimate of the posterior probability of the decision to be correct, given the evidence. Here we argue that correctness is neither a valid normative statement of what observers should be doing after their perceptual decision nor a proper descriptive statement of what they actually do. Instead, we propose that perceivers aim at being self-consistent with themselves. We present behavioral evidence obtained in two separate psychophysical experiments that human observers achieve that aim. In one experiment adaptation led to aftereffects, and in the other prior stimulus occurrences were manipulated. We show that confidence judgments perfectly follow changes in perceptual reports and response times, regardless of the nature of the bias. Although observers are able to judge the validity of their percepts, they are oblivious to how biased these percepts are. Focusing on self-consistency rather than correctness leads us to interpret confidence as an estimate of the reliability of one's perceptual decision rather than a distance to an unattainable truth.

中文翻译：

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感性信心判断反映了自我一致性。


每个感知决策通常都与对该决策的不确定性的置信度判断相关。置信度的经典定义是在给定证据的情况下，对决策正确的后验概率的估计。在这里，我们认为正确性既不是观察者在做出感知决定后应该做什么的有效规范性陈述，也不是他们实际所做的正确描述性陈述。相反，我们建议感知者的目标是与自己保持一致。我们提出了在两个独立的心理物理学实验中获得的行为证据，表明人类观察者实现了这一目标。在一项实验中，适应会产生后遗症，而在另一项实验中，先前的刺激事件则被操纵。我们表明，无论偏差的性质如何，置信度判断都完全遵循感知报告和响应时间的变化。尽管观察者能够判断他们的看法的有效性，但他们没有意识到这些看法有多么偏见。关注自我一致性而不是正确性使我们将信心解释为对一个人的感知决策的可靠性的估计，而不是与无法实现的真理的距离。