Data from: Behavioral and neural measures of confidence using a novel auditory pitch identification task

Observers can discriminate between correct versus incorrect perceptual
decisions with feelings of confidence. The centro-parietal
positivity build-up rate (CPP slope) has been suggested as
a likely neural signature of accumulated evidence, which may
guide both perceptual performance and confidence. However, CPP slope also
covaries with reaction time, which also covaries with confidence in
previous studies, and performance and confidence typically covary; thus,
CPP slope may index signatures of perceptual performance rather than
confidence per se. Moreover, perceptual metacognition – including neural
correlates – has largely been studied in vision, with few exceptions.
Thus, we lack understanding of domain-general neural signatures of
perceptual metacognition outside vision. Here we designed a novel auditory
pitch identification task and collected behavior with
simultaneous 32-channel EEG in healthy adults. Participants saw two tone
labels which varied in tonal distance on each trial (e.g., C vs D, C vs
F), then heard a single auditory tone; they identified which
label was correct and rated confidence. We found that pitch identification
confidence varied with tonal distance, but performance, metacognitive
sensitivity (trial-by-trial covariation of confidence with accuracy), and
reaction time did not. Interestingly, however, while CPP slope covaried
with performance and reaction time, it did not significantly covary with
confidence. We interpret these results to mean that CPP slope is likely a
signature of first-order perceptual processing and not confidence-specific
signals or computations in auditory tasks. Our novel pitch identification
task offers a valuable method to examine the neural correlates of
auditory and domain-general perceptual confidence.