There is a Threshold for Decision's Confidence in Hierarchical Perceptual Decision-Making

 Decision-making is one of the high orders of the brain’s cognitive functions. Most real-world decisions must be made in the face of uncertainty, and human’s process received information from the environment hierarchically. However, in the presence of hierarchy, the sources of the received negative feedback are ambiguous. Therefore, understanding how people reason with incomplete and ambiguous information is one of the main problems of cognitive psychology. People resolve this ambiguity after one or more attempts by evaluating the number of negative feedbacks, the choice confidence, and the expected accuracy of their choice. However, it is not well understood how confidence in lower-level decisions affects higher-level decisions.

We tested this hypothesis with a hierarchical decision-making task in which the subjects participated in a psychophysical experiment to determine the direction of random points and report their confidence about the decision. They were also instructed to make a high-level decision called "environment". From the collected behavioral data, the effects of each factor in hierarchical decisions were statistically isolated and studied by a logistic regression model.

We observed that the average confidence of individuals in the face of consecutive negative feedback has an increasing trend as they approach the switch trial. In the switch trial, it reaches its highest value, which is also higher than the overall average of confidence.

The present study indicates that decision confidence–In the consecutive errors- modulate the switch profile and encodes the probability of switches. These results highlight the critical rule of confidence in hierarchical decision-making and point out that it has a threshold for high-level decision.