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delighted to have been able to chip in on this newly published paper by @wiktoriakozyra.bsky.social & @smfleming.bsky.social on how confidence “biases” arise from normative Bayesian models!

I won’t get into details, but there is a strong take home message: as experimentalists, we can present participants with a task. but how they choose to represent that task and reason over it is up to them!

in this case, if people choose to represent additional possibilities that are unavailable for response, their behavior looks a lot like suboptimal heuristic models

on a final note, one thing I really like about this project is that it showcases a breadth of formal tools for cognitive science. when I joined the project, @wiktoriakozyra.bsky.social and @smfleming.bsky.social already had a number of convincing simulations and model fitting experiments

as a new postdoc, my role was mostly to add some related derivations and additional simulations. and even though all of these paths relied on different frameworks & assumptions, they all converge on the same result and mutually inform each other!

amen brother