{"pk":21498,"title":"Developing Irrational Confidence? Metacognition in Probabilistic Decisions with Multiple Alternatives","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Prevailing theories propose that confidence in two-alternative forced-choice decisions is based on the probability that the selected option is correct. However, recent findings from three-alternative tasks suggest that adults' confidence might irrationally reflect the difference between the probabilities of the best and next-best options only, with other options disregarded. Using a novel probability task (in which participants guess the colour of a ball to be randomly selected from varying distributions) and a uniquely sensitive confidence measure, we investigated metacognition in multi-option decision making in children (N = 97, aged 6-9-years) and adults (N = 51). Contrary to previous findings, children's and adults' confidence was primarily explained by the probability of the best option. However, preliminary findings suggest that among older children and adults, additional irrelevant factors also accounted for unique variance in confidence. In some contexts, human confidence might be initially calibrated rationally but increasingly reflect irrational factors over development.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Cognitive development; Decision making; Development"}],"section":"Papers with Oral Presentation","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/36k549nz","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Cate","middle_name":"","last_name":"MacColl","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Queensland","department":""},{"first_name":"David","middle_name":"K","last_name":"Sewell","name_suffix":"","institution":"The University of Queensland","department":""},{"first_name":"Jonathan","middle_name":"","last_name":"Redshaw","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Queensland","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2024-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/21498/galley/11097/download/"},{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/21498/galley/21943/download/"}]}