Understanding how people rate their confidence is critical for characterizing a wide range of perceptual, memory, motor, and cognitive processes. To enable the continued exploration of these processes, we created a large database of confidence studies spanning a broad set of paradigms, participant populations, and fields of study. The data from each study are structured in a common,

Temporal judgments regarding a target interval typically produce a nearly normally distributed reproduction times centered on the target with substantial variance. This phenomenon indicates that the majority of our temporal judgments are deviations from the target times, which are assumed to originate from the underlying timing uncertainty. Although humans were found to adapt their decisions in response to timing uncertainty, we do not know if they can accurately judge the direction and degree of their temporal errors. In this study, we asked participants to reproduce durations as accurately as possible. After each reproduction, participants were asked to retrospectively rate their confidence in their temporal estimates and to judge if their response time was earlier or later than the target interval. The results revealed that human participants are aware of both the direction and magnitude of their timing errors, pointing at an informationally rich ability. We further show that a sequential diffusion process can account for the detection of direction of errors as well as the qualitative features of the relationship of objective temporal errors with subjective confidence ratings and associated response times. (PsycINFO Database Record

Forming temporal expectations plays an instrumental role for the optimization of behavior and allocation of attentional resources. Although the effects of temporal expectations on visual attention are well-established, the question of whether temporal predictions modulate the behavioral outputs of the autonomic nervous system such as the pupillary response remains unanswered. Therefore, this study aimed to obtain an online measure of pupil size while human participants were asked to differentiate between visual targets presented after varying time intervals since trial onset. Specifically, we manipulated temporal predictability in the presentation of target stimuli consisting of letters which appeared after either a short or long delay duration (1.5 vs. 3 s) in the majority of trials (75%) within different test blocks. In the remaining trials (25%), no target stimulus was present to investigate the trajectory of preparatory pupillary response under a low level of temporal uncertainty. The results revealed that the rate of preparatory pupillary response was contingent upon the time of target appearance such that pupils dilated at a higher rate when the targets were expected to appear after a shorter as compared to a longer delay period irrespective of target presence. The finding that pupil size can track temporal regularities and exhibit differential preparatory response between different delay conditions points to the existence of a distributed neural network subserving temporal information processing which is crucial for cognitive functioning and goal-directed behavior.

In the temporal bisection task, participants classify experienced stimulus durations as short or long based on their temporal similarity to previously learned reference durations. Temporal decision making in this task should be influenced by the experienced probabilities of the reference durations for adaptiveness. In this study, we tested the temporal bisection performance of mice (Mus musculus) under different short and long reference duration probability conditions implemented across two experimental phases. In Phase 1, the proportion of reference durations (compared to probe durations) was 0.5, whereas in Phase 2 it was increased to 0.8 to further examine the adjustment of choice behavior with more frequent reference duration presentations (under higher reinforcement rate). Our findings suggest that mice developed adaptive biases in their choice behaviors. These adjustments in choice behavior were nearly optimal as the mice maximized their gain to a great extent which required them to monitor stimulus probabilities as well as the level of variability in their temporal judgments. We further found that short but not long categorization response times were sensitive to stimulus probability manipulations, which in turn suggests an asymmetry between short and long categorizations. Finally, we investigated the latent decision processes underlying the bias manifested in subjects' choice behavior within the diffusion model framework. Our results revealed that probabilistic information influenced the starting point and the rate of evidence accumulation process. Overall, the stimulus probability effects on choice behavior were modulated by the reinforcement rate. Our findings illustrate that mice can adapt their temporal behaviors with respect to the probabilistic contingencies in the environment.

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