Author summary Humans are able to report a sense of confidence in decisions that we make. It is widely hypothesized that confidence reflects the computed probability that a decision is accurate; however, this hypothesis has not been fully explored. We use several human behavioral experiments to test a variety of models that may be considered to be distinct hypotheses about the computational underpinnings of confidence. We find that reported confidence does not appear to reflect the probability that a decision is correct, but instead emerges from a heuristic approximation of this probability.
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