PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - Rachel N. Denison AU - William T. Adler AU - Marisa Carrasco AU - Wei Ji Ma TI - Humans flexibly incorporate attention-dependent uncertainty into perceptual decisions and confidence AID - 10.1101/175075 DP - 2017 Jan 01 TA - bioRxiv PG - 175075 4099 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/08/10/175075.short 4100 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/08/10/175075.full AB - Perceptual decisions are better when they take uncertainty into account. Here we show that human decision-making accounts for uncertainty arising not only from external factors, but from the observer’s cognitive state. We manipulated uncertainty in an orientation categorization task from trial to trial using only an attentional cue. Category and confidence decision boundaries shifted in an approximately Bayesian fashion. This responsiveness likely improves perceptual decisions in natural vision.