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How much we trust our own decisions, knowledge or perceptions influences our behavior in many everyday situations. Normally the confidence we have in our decisions is rather accurate, but under certain circumstances the subjective evaluation of a decision and its objective quality can differ heavily. Subjectively over- or underestimating the quality of decisions can lead to disadvantageous behavior. Little is known about how this feeling of confidence about a decision is generated. Is it computed automatically with the decision or does it arise in a different process?
This thesis is based on a publication that contributed to the investigation of this question by comparing the influence of two different forms of spatial attention on decision confidence. Visual spatial attention is a cognitive mechanism that serves to select parts of the visual field, leading to more accurate decisions about the attended items. It can be either voluntarily controlled (endogenous) or reflexively driven by external events (exogenous). In an orientation-matching task participants performed better in both attentional conditions than in a control condition without directed attention. Additionally, we found that only endogenous, but not exogenous attention led the subjects to overestimate the quality of their performance. The possible implications of this “relative overconfidence” were discussed with respect to the theoretical framework of spatial attention and decision confidence. The present findings support the idea that decision confidence is generated in a distinct metacognitive process. Possible ideas for further neurophysiological research are proposed. The thesis concludes with an attempt to integrate the discussion into a broader context of medical research on certain neuropsychiatric symptoms and conditions.