Reduced choice-confidence in negative numerals

Santiago Alonso-Díaz and Gabriel I Penagos-Londoño

PLOS ONE, 2022, vol. 17, issue 10, 1-28

Abstract: Negative numbers are central in math. However, they are abstract, hard to learn, and manipulated slower than positive numbers regardless of math ability. It suggests that confidence, namely the post-decision estimate of being correct, should be lower than positives. We asked participants to pick the larger single-digit numeral in a pair and collected their implicit confidence with button pressure (button pressure was validated with three empirical signatures of confidence). We also modeled their choices with a drift-diffusion decision model to compute the post-decision estimate of being correct. We found that participants had relatively low confidence with negative numerals. Given that participants compared with high accuracy the basic base-10 symbols (0–9), reduced confidence may be a general feature of manipulating abstract negative numerals as they produce more uncertainty than positive numerals per unit of time.

Date: 2022
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0272796

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0272796

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