Humans experience feelings of confidence in their decisions. In perception, these feelings are typically accurate - we tend to feel more confident about correct decisions. The degree of insight people have into the accuracy of their decisions is known as metacognitive sensitivity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform
December 2023
When experimenters vary the timing between two intersensory events, and participants judge their simultaneity, an inverse-U-shaped psychometric function is obtained. Typically, this is first fitted with a model for each participant separately, before best-fitting parameters are utilized (e.g.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe oddball protocol has been used to study the neural and perceptual consequences of implicit predictions in the human brain. The protocol involves presenting a sequence of identical repeated events that are eventually broken by a novel "oddball" presentation. Oddball presentations have been linked to increased neural responding and to an exaggeration of perceived duration relative to repeated events.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAtten Percept Psychophys
August 2023
The oddball paradigm is commonly used to investigate human time perception. Trains of identical repeated events ('standards') are presented, only to be interrupted by a different 'oddball' that seems to have a relatively protracted duration. One theoretical account has been that this effect is driven by repetition suppression for repeated standards.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSignal-detection theory (SDT) is one of the most popular frameworks for analyzing data from studies of human behavior - including investigations of confidence. SDT-based analyses of confidence deliver both standard estimates of sensitivity (d'), and a second estimate informed by high-confidence decisions - meta d'. The extent to which meta d' estimates fall short of d' estimates is regarded as a measure of metacognitive inefficiency, quantifying the contamination of confidence by additional noise.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUsing Electroencephalography (EEG) an event-related change in alpha activity has been observed over primary sensory cortices during the allocation of spatial attention. This is most prominent during top-down, or endogenous, attention, and nearly absent in bottom-up, or exogenous orienting. These changes are highly lateralised, such that an increase in alpha power is seen ipsilateral to the attended region of space and a decrease is seen contralaterally.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAtten Percept Psychophys
July 2022
Repeated events can seem shortened. It has been suggested that this results from an inverse relationship between predictability and perceived duration, with more predictable events seeming shorter. Some evidence disputes this generalisation, as there are cases where this relationship has been nullified, or even reversed.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis study examined the effects of calorie labelling and two key contextual factors (reflective motivation and habits) on the calorie content of hypothetical coffee-shop menu choices. In one exploratory (n = 70) and one pre-registered (n = 300) laboratory study (Studies 1 and 2 respectively), participants viewed a hypothetical calorie-labelled or non calorie-labelled menuboard and selected their preferred item(s). Coffee shop drinking habits were measured using the Self-Report Habit Index, and reflective motivation (relating to calorie intake) was assessed with three items asking about watching weight, eating healthily, and reading calorie labels.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOne of the seminal findings of cognitive neuroscience is that the power of occipital alpha-band (~ 10 Hz) brain waves is increased when peoples' eyes are closed, rather than open. This has encouraged the view that alpha oscillations are a default dynamic, to which the visual brain returns in the absence of input. Accordingly, we might be unable to increase the power of alpha oscillations when the eyes are closed, above the level that would normally ensue when people close their eyes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWhen a visual event is unexpected, because it violates a train of repeated events, it excites a greater positive electrical potential at sensors positioned above occipital-parietal human brain regions (the P300). Such events can also seem to have an increased duration relative to repeated (implicitly expected) events. However, recent behavioural evidence suggests that when events are unexpected because they violate a declared prediction-a guess-there is an opposite impact on duration perception.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe brain-time account posits that the physical timing of sensory-evoked neural activity determines the perceived timing of corresponding sensory events. A canonical model formalises this account for tasks such as simultaneity and order judgements: Signals arrive at a decision centre in an order, and at a temporal offset, shaped by neural propagation times. This model assumes that the noise affecting people's temporal judgements is primarily neural-latency noise, i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPrediction is a core function of the human visual system. Contemporary research suggests the brain builds predictive internal models of the world to facilitate interactions with our dynamic environment. Here, we wanted to examine the behavioural and neurological consequences of disrupting a core property of peoples' internal models, using naturalistic stimuli.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRehabilitating upper limb function after stroke is a key therapeutic goal. In healthy brains, objects, especially tools, are said to cause automatic motoric 'affordances'; affecting our preparation to handle objects. For example, the N2 event-related potential has been shown to correlate with the functional properties of objects in healthy adults during passive viewing.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAtten Percept Psychophys
October 2020
The Publisher regrets the following production error. The labels for Figures 2, 4, 5, 6, and 7 describe an older version of the figures. The correct figure labels are as follows.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDecision-making is a fundamental human activity requiring explanation at the neurocognitive level. Current theoretical frameworks assume that, during sensory-based decision-making, the stimulus is sampled sequentially. The resulting evidence is accumulated over time as a decision variable until a threshold is reached and a response is initiated.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHumans perceptual judgments are imprecise, as repeated exposures to the same physical stimulation (e.g. audio-visual inputs separated by a constant temporal offset) can result in different decisions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAtten Percept Psychophys
June 2020
In the visual oddball paradigm, surprising inputs can seem expanded in time relative to unsurprising repeated events. A horizontal input embedded in a train of successive vertical inputs can, for instance, seem relatively protracted in time, even if all inputs are presented for an identical duration. It is unclear if this effect results from surprising events becoming apparently protracted, or from repeated events becoming apparently contracted in time.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPrevious research suggests the existence of an expert anticipatory advantage, whereby skilled sportspeople are able to predict an upcoming action by utilizing cues contained in their opponent's body kinematics. This ability is often inferred from "occlusion" experiments: information is systematically removed from first-person videos of an opponent, for example, by stopping a tennis video at the point of racket-ball contact, yet performance, such as discrimination of shot direction, remains above chance. In this study, we assessed the expert anticipatory advantage for tennis ground strokes via a modified approach, known as "bubbles," in which information is randomly removed from videos in each trial.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The plantar foot represents a sensory dynamometric map and is essential for balance and gait control. Sensory impairments are common, yet often difficult to quantify in neurological conditions, particularly stroke. A functionally oriented and quantifiable assessment, the Foot Roughness Discrimination Test (FoRDT), was developed to address these shortcomings.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: To investigate the prevalence of financial interests among patient organisations contributing to health technology assessment at the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) in England and the extent to which NICE's disclosure policy ensures that decision making committees are aware of these interests.
Design: Policy review using accounts, annual reports, and websites of patient organisations; payments declared by pharmaceutical manufacturers on their websites and a centralised database (Disclosure UK); declarations of interests by nominated representatives of patient organisations; and responses from patient organisations.
Setting: Appraisals of medicines and treatments (technologies) for use in the English and Welsh National Health Service.
To evaluate the psychometric properties of two novel tests of lower limb position sense. Our newly developed tests assess the discrimination thresholds of under-foot slope and step height perception using a two alternative forced choice approach. Stroke participants ( = 32) and age matched controls ( = 32) were tested.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHumans can rapidly discriminate complex scenarios as they unfold in real time, for example during law enforcement or, more prosaically, driving and sport. Such decision-making improves with experience, as new sources of information are exploited. For example, sports experts are able to predict the outcome of their opponent's next action (e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe neural dynamics underpinning binary perceptual decisions and their transformation into actions are well studied, but real-world decisions typically offer more than two response alternatives. How does decision-related evidence accumulation dynamically influence multiple action representations in humans? The heightened conservatism required in multiple compared with binary choice scenarios suggests a mechanism that compensates for increased uncertainty when multiple choices are present by suppressing baseline activity. Here, we tracked action representations using corticospinal excitability during four- and two-choice perceptual decisions and modeled them using a sequential sampling framework.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Epidemiol Community Health
October 2018
Background: Little is known about the political views of doctors in the UK despite doctors' importance in the functioning of the National Health Service (NHS).
Methods: This is a survey-based, cross-sectional study in which we asked questions about voting behaviour in 2015 and 2017 UK general elections and 2016 referendum on leaving the European Union (EU) (Brexit), and questions relating to recent health policies.
Results: 1172 doctors (45.
Evolutionary pressures suggest that choices should be optimized to maximize rewards, by appropriately trading speed for accuracy. This speed-accuracy tradeoff (SAT) is commonly explained by variation in just the baseline-to-boundary distance, i.e.
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