Confidence response times: Challenging postdecisional models of confidence

Even though the nature of confidence computations has been the topic of intense interest, little attention has been paid to what confidence response times (cRTs) reveal about the underlying confidence computations. Several previous studies found cRTs to be negatively correlated with confidence in the group as a whole and consequently hypothesized the existence of an intrinsic relationship of cRT with confidence for all subjects. This hypothesis was further used to support postdecisional models of confidence that predict that cRT and confidence should always be negatively correlated. Here we test the alternative hypothesis that cRT is driven by the frequency of confidence responses such that the most frequent confidence ratings are inherently made faster regardless of whether they are high or low. We examined cRTs in three large data sets from the Confidence Database and found that the lowest cRTs occurred for the most frequent confidence rating. In other words, subjects who gave high confidence ratings most frequently had negative confidence–cRT relationships, whereas subjects who gave low confidence ratings most frequently had positive confidence–cRT relationships. In addition, we found a strong across-subject correlation between response time and cRT, suggesting that response speed for both the decision and the confidence rating is influenced by a common factor. Our results show that cRT is not intrinsically linked to confidence and strongly challenge several postdecisional models of confidence.