A Domain-General Sense of Confidence in Children
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Our minds constantly evaluate the confidence in what we see, think, and remember. Previous work suggests that confidence is a domain-general currency in adulthood, unifying otherwise independent sensory and perceptual representations. Here, we test whether children also possess a domain-general sense of confidence over otherwise independent perceptual dimensions. Six- to 9-year-olds completed either three simple perceptual discrimination tasks—a number task (“Which group has more dots?”), an area task (“Which blob is bigger?”), and an emotions task (“Which face is happier?”)—or three relative confidence tasks, selecting which of two trials they are more confident on. We find that while children’s discrimination performance across the three tasks was independent and constituted three separate factors, children’s confidence in each of three dimensions was strongly correlated and constituted only a single factor. Our results suggest that confidence is a domain-general currency even in childhood, providing a mechanism by which disparate perceptual representations could be integrated.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".