Computerized methods for collecting confidence ratings: Task influences on patterns of responding
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Psychiatry and Psychology, Statistics, Human-Computer Interaction
- Keywords
- confidence, scaling, sliders, keypad, data entry, judgment, habit, rating, decisionmaking, metacognition
- Copyright
- © 2015 DeSoto
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2015. Computerized methods for collecting confidence ratings: Task influences on patterns of responding. PeerJ PrePrints 3:e1432v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.1432v1
Abstract
Retrospective confidence ratings and other judgments frequently are collected in computer-based psychology studies, but little research has investigated whether the method with which these ratings are collected influences the resulting data. To explore whether different confidence rating entry methods elicit different responses, 96 subjects were tested in a recognition memory paradigm. To rate confidence in recognition decisions from 0 - 100, half of the subjects used the numeric keypad on the keyboard to respond whereas the other half used an on-screen slider. Notably, whereas subjects using the numeric keypad frequently chose to enter confidence ratings divisible by 5 and 10, subjects using the slider showed no such preference but instead were more likely to accept the slider default value (i.e., 50) for each trial. The method with which confidence ratings are collected may have unintended consequences on confidence rating data and their interpretation.
Author Comment
This article has been submitted to PeerJ for review.