Dr. Dobromir (Doby) Rahnev’s research probes the computational and neural bases of perceptual decision-making, a field that centers on a fundamental function of the brain: deciding on a course of action based on sensory information. One important line of Dr. Rahnev’s work has modeled the impact of attention on confidence ratings for making perceptual decisions. He uses a psychophysical approach to model the disconnect between our subjective experience of having an extensive awareness of the surrounding physical environment and our sharply limited attentional system that represents only a tiny amount of information at once. This work reveals a compelling but counterintuitive relationship between perceptual noise and confidence: adding more noise into the decision process produces higher confidence. Dr. Rahnev has further tested this novel cognitive model with an experimentally casual approach to inducing noise into the decision. His notable recent work broadens this perspective and applies it to the concept of metacognitive efficiency – How accurate are you at predicting your own accuracy in a task? Importantly, this work is at the nexus of the cutting edges of both cognitive and perceptual science and within neuroscience broadly.
