A reexamination of postdiction within a free-choice task

Abstract

People o en misperceive the timing of when they made a decision. Bear & Bloom (2016) asked participants to choose one white circle from a selection of ve white circles and to continue watching them until a predetermined target circle changed to red, and then report whether it was their chosen circle that had changed color. e participants tended to report having chosen the target circle under a quick-change condition, which indicates that, although choices were a ected by the change, people perceive having made their choice prior to the change. As new evidence supporting the postdiction of decision-making timings, the present study reports a similar e ect for delays of 25–50 ms, but not for 17 ms. Moreover, the propensity for participants to report having chosen any circle by a deadline was observed to be greater at delays of 167 ms or less, which indicates that awareness of decision-making is postdictive in nature when delays are short.