Robert A. M. Gregson, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia

Abstract: Psychophysical tasks requiring stimulus discrimination frequently report underconfidence; subjects think they are doing less accurately at discrimination or identification than is the case, measured in terms of probabilities of correct performance. An investigation to see if underconfidence is predictable from the intrinsic nonlinearities of the psychophysics, without assuming that confidence itself is a subjective analogue of a frequentist probability of correct identification, is explored using the algebra of cascaded nonlinear psychophysics previously developed.

Keywords: psychophysics, probability, decision, confidence, nonlinear systems