Long-term perceptual priors drive confidence bias that favors prior-congruent evidence

According to the Bayesian framework, both our perceptual decisions and confidence about those decisions are based on the precision-weighted integration of prior expectations and incoming sensory information. While it is generally assumed that priors influence both decisions and confidence in the same way, previous work has found priors to have a stronger impact at the confidence level, challenging this assumption. However, these patterns were found for high-level probabilistic expectations that are flexibly induced in the task context. It remains unclear whether this generalizes to low-level perceptual priors that are naturally formed through long term exposure. Here we investigated human participants’ confidence in decisions made under the influence of a long-term perceptual prior: the slow-motion prior. Participants viewed tilted moving-line stimuli for which the slow-motion prior biases the perceived motion direction. On each trial, they made two consecutive motion direction decisions followed by a confidence decision. We contrasted two conditions – one in which the prior impacted discrimination performance, and one in which it did not. We found a confidence bias favoring the condition in which the prior influenced discrimination decisions, even after accounting for performance differences. Computational modeling revealed this effect to be best explained by confidence using the prior-congruent evidence as an additional cue, beyond the posterior evidence used in the perceptual decision. This is in agreement with a confirmatory confidence bias favoring evidence congruent with low-level perceptual priors, revealing that, in line with high-level expectations, even long-term priors have a greater influence on the metacognitive level than on perceptual decisions.Author summary: Prior expectations play a critical role in shaping not only the perceptual inferences that we make, but also how confident we feel about those inferences. Bayesian confidence models capture that role, but assume priors to influence both decisions and confidence in the same way. Against this assumption, previous work has found dissociations in the influence of priors on decisions and confidence. However, that work has focussed only on high-level probabilistic priors, rather than the low-level perceptual priors that constrain our processing across many naturalistic situations. Here, we examine whether such dissociations arise under the influence of a low-level perceptual prior that naturally affects humans’ perception of motion, namely, the expectation that objects move slowly. We reveal evidence for such a dissociation: prior-congruent evidence impacts confidence to a greater extent than perceptual decisions. This suggests the existence of an implicit confidence bias favoring information that confirms prior beliefs, even in the case of long-term perceptual priors.