Contextual influence on confidence judgments in human reinforcement learning.

Abstract

The ability to correctly estimate the probability of ones choices being correct is fundamental to optimally re-evaluate previous choices or to arbitrate between different decision strategies. Experimental evidence nonetheless suggests that this metacognitive process -referred to as a confidence judgment-is susceptible to numerous biases. We investigate the effect of outcome valence (gains or losses) on confidence while participants learned stimulus-outcome associations by trial-and-error. In two experiments, we demonstrate that participants are more confident in their choices when learning to seek gains compared to avoiding losses. Importantly, these differences in confidence were observed despite objectively equal choice difficulty and similar observed performance between those two contexts. Using computational modelling, we show that this bias is driven by the context-value, a dynamically updated estimate of the average expected-value of choice options that has previously been demonstrated to be necessary to explain equal performance in the gain and loss domain. The biasing effect of context-value on confidence, also recently observed in the context of incentivized perceptual decision-making, is therefore domain-general, with likely important functional consequences.