UC Irvine cognitive sciences associate professor Megan Peters, along with coauthors Brian Maniscalco, a project scientist previously in Peters’ Cognitive & Neural Computation Lab, and Lucie Charles, Queen Mary University of London biological and behavioural sciences lecturer, have been named recipients of a 2025 Best Article Award from the Psychonomic Society.

The honor recognizes their paper, "Optimal metacognitive decision strategies in signal detection theory," published this past year in the Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, in which the researchers apply signal detection theory – a psychological model of how observers make decisions under uncertainty – to the study of metacognition, our ability to monitor our own cognitive processing.

“How we assign ‘confidence’ to the decisions we make is a highly important but poorly understood cognitive capacity. For example, imagine you are driving on a foggy road at night, versus in the clear daylight under ideal conditions. Your actions – your choice of speed, of how many distractions you can tolerate, or of how to react to a surprising event – will depend both on how well you can actually see and how well you think you can see, or how confident you feel in your visual ability,” says Peters. “But how do we decide how well we think we can see, and when might that feeling deviate from your actual visual acuity? This project developed approaches for quantifying how and why people might assign confidence differently under different circumstances, even if their ability to do some task – like see what’s up ahead on the road – is the same.”

“You might change your confidence judgments if the stakes are higher and the cost of an error changes, or if you want to use confidence in varying ways to learn from your mistakes,” she adds. “Understanding how we assign confidence to our visual interpretations of the world also has important consequences for how we evaluate confidence in other domains too, like memory (“Should I keep studying for that test?”) or medicine (“How sure am I that this diagnosis is correct?).”

Maniscalco and Charles are co-first authors on the paper and will be honored at the Psychonomic Society’s 66th annual meeting to be held November 20-23 in Denver.