Evidence or Confidence: What Really Accumulates During a Decision?

Abstract

Assessing our confidence in the choices we make is of paramount importance to making adaptive decisions, and it is thus no surprise that we excel in this ability. However, standard models of decision-making, such as the drift-diffusion model (DDM), treat confidence assessment as a post-hoc or parallel process that does not directly influence the choice, which depends only on accumulated evidence. Here, we pursue the alternative hypothesis that what is monitored during a decision is an evolving sense of confidence (that the to-be-selected option is the best) rather than raw evidence. Monitoring confidence has the appealing consequence that the decision threshold corresponds to a desired level of confidence for the choice, and that confidence improvements can be traded off against the resources required to secure them. We show that most previous findings on perceptual and value-based decisions traditionally interpreted from an evidence-accumulation perspective can be explained more parsimoniously from our novel confidence-driven perspective. Furthermore, we show that our novel confidence-driven DDM (cDDM) naturally generalizes to decisions involving any number of alternative options - which is notoriously extemporaneous using traditional DDM or related models. Finally, we discuss future empirical evidence that could be useful in adjudicating between these alternatives.