Paper on confidence in high-dimensional spaces in Open Mind

Kevin O’Neill’s collaboration with former MetaLab member Wiktoria Kozyra on confidence estimates is now published in Open Mind.

The intuition is that as more dimensions are added to the stimulus space, they act to compress the effect of distractors on confidence due to normalisation. This means that confidence is more sensitive to the chosen evidence relative to unchosen evidence, which is the hallmark of the positive evidence bias.

A broader implication of our results is that, in higher dimensional spaces, confidence criteria for detection and identification become more similar, and strict dissociations between detection and discrimination performance (e.g. in blindsight and related conditions) may be a consequence of the adoption of narrower stimulus spaces.

Congratulations Wiktoria & Kevin!