Perceptual decision-making employs a range of higher order metacognitive processes. Two of the most important of these are perceptual awareness; or the clarity with which one reports seeing a perceptual stimulus, and response confidence; or the certainty one has about the correctness of one's own perceptual categorizations. We used a novel false feedback paradigm to investigate the relationships between these two processes. We asked people to perform a standard psychophysical detection task. We used feedback to selectively intervene either on our participants’ trust in their own perceptual awareness of the stimulus, or on their confidence in their own responses. We measured the effects of these interventions on response accuracy; on reports of perceptual awareness; and on response confidence. We found that by undermining people's trust in their awareness of the sensory stimulus, we could reliably reduce their accuracy on the task. We suggest that the reason this occurred is that people came to rely less on evidence from their senses when making perceptual decisions. We conclude by suggesting that there is a not a one-to-one mapping between content in conscious experience and how that content is used in perceptual decision making, and that one's perception of the reliability of content also plays a role.
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