What Determines Human Certainty?

Louis Martí, Francis Mollica, Steven Piantadosi, Celeste Kidd

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Previous work on concept learning has focused on how concepts are acquired, without addressing metacognitive aspects of this process. An important part of concept learning from a learner's perspective is knowing subjectively when a new concept has been effectively learned. Here, we investigate learners' certainty in a classic Boolean concept-learning task. We collected certainty judgements during the concept-learning task from 552 participants on Amazon Mechanical Turk. We compare different models of certainty in order to determine exactly what learners' subjective certainty judgments encode. Our results suggest that learners' certainty is best explained by local accuracy rather than plausible alternatives such as total entropy or the maximum a posteriori hypothesis of an idealized Bayesian learner. This result suggests that certainty predominately reflects learners' performance and feedback, rather than any metacognition about the inferential task they are solving.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 38th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society 2016
PublisherAustin TX: Cognitive Science Society
Pages698-703
Number of pages6
ISBN (Electronic)978-0-9911967-3-9
ISBN (Print)9781510832985
Publication statusPublished - 13 Aug 2016
Event38th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society 2016 - Philadelphia, United States
Duration: 10 Aug 201613 Aug 2016
http://cognitivesciencesociety.org/conference2016/index.html

Conference

Conference38th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society 2016
Abbreviated titleCogSci 2016
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityPhiladelphia
Period10/08/1613/08/16
Internet address

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