Why does it feel good to be sure? A unifying framework of decision confidence and affect.

Confidence and affect tend to go hand-in-hand – being confident in something often feels positive and unconfident negative. This hints that affective states may have a role to play in metacognition and control in concert with confidence. However, the mere observation that confidence and affective valence tend to correlate does not prove that confidence itself is affective. This calls for a detailed analysis of mechanisms by which decision dynamics generate metacognitive confidence and affect. Relying on recent theoretical insights from affective- and cognitive neuroscience, the aim of this project is to develop a computational framework and an experimental paradigm for understanding how affect and confidence emerge from and regulate decision processes.