The precision test of metacognitive sensitivity and confidence criteria

•People experience greater confidence when they make good as opposed to inaccurate perceptual decisions.•This is known as perceptual metacognition.•Current gold standard approaches to measuring perceptual metacognition are subject to known interpretive ambiguities.•The authors describe a better measure of metacognitive sensitivity, and provide scripts to implement this new approach. Humans experience feelings of confidence in their decisions. In perception, these feelings are typically accurate – we tend to feel more confident about correct decisions. The degree of insight people have into the accuracy of their decisions is known as metacognitive sensitivity. Currently popular methods of estimating metacognitive sensitivity are subject to interpretive ambiguities because they assume people have normally shaped distributions of different experiences when they are repeatedly exposed to a single input. If this normality assumption is violated, calculations can erroneously underestimate metacognitive sensitivity. Here, we describe a means of estimating metacognitive sensitivity that is more robust to violations of the normality assumption. This improved method can easily be added to standard behavioral experiments, and the authors provide Matlab code to help researchers implement these analyses and experimental procedures.