title: Perceptual confidence demonstrates trial-by-trial insight into the precision of audio-visual timing encoding.
abstract: Peoples' subjective feelings of confidence typically correlate positively with objective measures of task performance, even when no performance feedback is provided. This relationship has seldom been investigated in the field of human time perception. Here we find a positive relationship between the precision of human timing perception and decisional confidence. We first demonstrate that subjective audio-visual timing judgements are more precise when people report a high, as opposed to a low, level of confidence. We then find that this relationship is more likely to result from variance in sensory timing estimates than the application of variable decision criteria, as the relationship held when we adopted a measure of timing sensitivity designed to limit the influence of subjective criteria. Our results suggest analyses of timing perception and associated decisional confidence reflect the trial-by-trial variability with which timing has been encoded.
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, University of Queensland, Australia. Electronic address: brendan.keane1@uqconnect.edu.au.
authors.forename: Brendan
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Keane
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, University of Queensland, Australia.
authors.forename: Morgan
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Spence
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, City University London, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Kielan
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Yarrow
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, University of Queensland, Australia.
authors.forename: Derek
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Arnold
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D000067489:Metacognition / Q000502:physiology*; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology*; D013998:Time Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Confidence; Insight; Metacognition; Perception; Temporal