Date of Award
2022
Degree Type
UG Dissertation
First Advisor
Prof. Alan Lee Lap Fai
Abstract
Our brain processes noisy and incomplete information to make adaptive decisions and chooses appropriate responses based on the strength of our subjective evaluation. Such subjective evaluation of our decisions could be referred to our metacognition— the ability to monitor and recognize our own successful cognitive processing. What information does our metacognitive system take in during subjective evaluation? To what extent our metacognitive judgements are influenced by the context? The current study aims to investigate whether there is an effect of contextual uncertainty on confidence judgments when perceptual performance is controlled. In this study, participants were required to perform both type 1 and type 2 judgements, in which they first determine the orientation of the perceptual stimuli by ignoring the context, and then they perform a retrospective judgment measured in confidence level. Our findings showed that there was a significant effect of contextual uncertainty on confidence judgments and our metacognitive system will be most susceptible to the surrounding information when task difficulty is moderately easy. The altered sensitivity in perception could potentially explain such contextual effect on confidence judgments and we proposed two contrasting concepts to explicate how various levels of contextual uncertainty could influence our confidence judgments differently.
Language
English
Copyright
The copyright of this dissertation is owned by its author. Any reproduction, adaptation, distribution or dissemination of this thesis without express authorization is strictly prohibited.
Recommended Citation
Lam, W. K. (2022). The effect of contextual uncertainty on confidence judgements in perception and its relation to metacognition (UG dissertation, Lingnan University, Hong Kong). Retrieved from https://commons.ln.edu.hk/socsci_fyp/21