selective attention increases choice certainty in human decision making选择性注意增加人类决策选择确定.pdfVIP

Selective Attention Increases Choice Certainty in Human Decision Making 1 1,2 1 Leopold Zizlsperger , Thomas Sauvigny , Thomas Haarmeier * ¨ ¨ 1 Department of Neurology, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany, 2 Department of General Neurology, University of Tubingen, Tubingen, Germany Abstract Choice certainty is a probabilistic estimate of past performance and expected outcome. In perceptual decisions the degree of confidence correlates closely with choice accuracy and reaction times, suggesting an intimate relationship to objective performance. Here we show that spatial and feature-based attention increase human subjects’ certainty more than accuracy in visual motion discrimination tasks. Our findings demonstrate for the first time a dissociation of choice accuracy and certainty with a significantly stronger influence of voluntary top-down attention on subjective performance measures than on objective performance. These results reveal a so far unknown mechanism of the selection process implemented by attention and suggest a unique biological valence of choice certainty beyond a faithful reflection of the decision process. Citation: Zizlsperger L, Sauvigny T, Haarmeier T (2012) Selective Attention Increases Choice Certainty in Human Decision Making. PLoS ONE 7(7): e41136. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0041136 Editor: Markus Lappe, University of Muenster, Germany Received March 29, 2012; Accepted June 18, 2012; Published July 16, 2012 Copyright: 2012 Zizlsperger et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits