Toward Online Measurement of Decision State

In traditional perceptual decision-making experiments, two pieces of data recollected on each trial: response time and accuracy. But how confident were participants and how did their decision state evolve over time? We asked participants to provide a continuous readout of their decision state by moving a cursor along a sliding scale between a 100% certain left response and a 100% certain right response. Subjects did not terminate the trials; rather, trials were timed out at random and subjects were scored based on the cursor position at the time. Higher rewards for correct responses and higher penalties for errors were associated with extreme responses so that the response with the highest ex[pected value was that which accurately reflected the participant's odds of being correct. This procedure encourages participants to expose the time-course of their evolving decision state. Evidence on how well they can do this will be presented.