Hélène Van Marcke (KU Leuven) – The construction of decision confidence.

Humans continuously make decisions that are always accompanied by a sense of confidence. Sometimes, you can be a hundred percent sure that you’ve made the correct decision, while at other times, you don’t have a clue. So then, what exactly is this sense of confidence based on? According to the most influential accounts of decision confidence, this subjective feeling is mainly based on the accumulation of objective evidence; an interpretation that leaves little to no room for more subjective influences on confidence.
The focus of my PhD is to look at what other factors determine a person’s sense of confidence. How is decision confidence influenced by individual factors, contextual factors, physiological factors, and so on? Using both behavioural measures and neuroimaging, I aim to broaden the view on what determines decision confidence and investigate how confidence is affected by different factors on a computational, neural, and behavioural level.