Figure 6. Validation of specific predictions of conditional inference (N = 30).

(a) Decrease in evidence discard rate with stimulus strength. The reliability threshold does not vary with stimulus strength, resulting in discard rates which decrease with stimulus strength (one blue dot per participant). Black dots represent group-level means and error bars represent their associated standard deviations. Horizontal blue lines represent group-level medians. (b) Selective relation between reliability and confidence criteria. Left panel: correlation between confidence threshold and reliability threshold across participants. As predicted by conditional inference, the reliability threshold estimated in the volatile decision-making task correlates positively with the confidence threshold estimated when categorizing isolated stimuli. Parameters are presented as mean ± s.d. of posterior distributions of each fit. Shaded area corresponds to the 95% confidence interval for the regression line. Right panel: variance of confidence threshold explained by each model parameter. The reliability threshold shares more variance with the confidence threshold than the other two model parameters. Bars correspond to r² and error bars to the interquartile ranges of each r² measure obtained through bootstrapping (N = 10⁴).