New paper in eLife: Confidence predicts speed-accuracy tradeoff for subsequent choices

Desender K, Boldt A, Verguts T & Donner TH. (2019) Confidence Predicts Speed-accuracy Tradeoff for Subsequent Choices. eLife. 8: e43499.

By Kobe Desender & Tobias H Donner.

Humans can provide precise judgments of the accuracy of their choices. When we feel confident in a choice we have just made, the probability is high that it was actually correct. Conversely, when we feel uncertain, the probability of being correct is very low. In recent years, many researchers have examined computational and neural underpinnings of this subjective sense of confidence. A central question for the field is what sense of confidence is good for – in other words, how it is put to use in the brain (Meyniel et al, 2015). Continue reading →

Introducing the confidence database

Thanks to huge efforts of Doby Rahnev, a large collection of open data on behavioral tasks using subjective ratings was just made available. The database contains (at current) 145 datasets, and is fully open for everyone to use. I added a couple of my own datasets on subjective difficulty, with the hope that people might find it interestingt to examine whether different types of ratings (confidence, subjective difficulty, etc.) show the same or different dynamics. I think this is a great, ambitious project, that can tremendously speed up model developments! The database itself can be found here, while a paper describing the database can be found on psyarxiv. If you want to help popularizing the database on twitter, here’s Doby tweet about it.

Songs!

In order to make this page more fun to visit, I added a couple of songs from my band to this website! In my free time, I play keys and guitar in Tales of Taori, and make music together with Mr Oak in Rhubarb, so a bit (more) shameless self-promotion!

One of the ideas I’d like to pursue is to actually make songs about my research, which I think is an enourmous untapped market! Hopefully soon…

A neural marker of confidence predicts information seeking – new paper in Journal of Neuroscience

Awesome news: our paper on the neural markers of confidence and information seeking, with Peter Murphy, Annika Boldt, Tom Verguts and Nick Yeung, has now been in accepted in The Journal of Neuroscience. You can find the paper here! Data collection for this study was done back in 2015 (ages ago, it feels) when I spent three months in Nick Yeung’s lab at Oxford University. Actually, I collected these data in the very last week of my stay there – so the ratio data analysis/writing versus data collection for this project must be about 205:1.

Continue reading →

PhD opening!

As of now, we’re looking for motivated students to work on a PhD project entitled “The role of confidence and urgency in deciding to stop sampling information”, together with Elise Lesage and Tom Verguts. We also have a second opening for a project on “A model-based approach to study transfer in decision making and cognitive control“. The positions have been filled, but have a look here :-).

Two Research Grants!

Awesome news today: two research grant proposals were accepted by the FWO-Vlaanderen, so soon we’ll be investigating the contagious nature of cognitive control (with Eva Van den Bussche and Gethin Hughes) and the influence of certainty and urgency on making choices (with Elise Lesage and Tom Verguts). Very excited about both of these – guess we’re looking for interested, prospective PhD-students from now on!

First preprint: A post-decisional neural marker of confidence predicts information-seeking

I just posted my first preprint: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/10/02/433276.
Here, we followed up on the findings of our recent psych science paper, and tested which neural markers translate subjective confidence into overt decisions to sample additional information. Using multivariate single-trial decoding, we showed that a classifier trained to decode high vs low confidence from EEG data, can predict information-seeking choices. Thus, our findings unravel a shared neural coding for decision confidence and information-seeking choices!
Curious to see how this will work out.

Transgender and the brain (new blog!)

I wrote another blog for studio brein (in Dutch) about a breinwijzer presentation I attended focussing on transgenders and their brains. Very fascinating topic, altough the take-home message was -more or less- that there’s very little we already know about the brain of transgenders! So af often: more work to do! Read the full blog here