Confidence Ratings, Message Reception, and the Receiver Operating Characteristic
Irwin W. Pollack, Louis R. Decker · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1958
A rating scale was added to the standard articulation test procedure in order to obtain independent information about a listener's criterion for message acceptance or rejection. We find that assignment of confidence ratings does not interfere with the accuracy of message reception. The form of the receiver operating characteristic—the relationship between correct confirmations and false alarms—yielded by the rating procedure is similar to that yielded by a binary decision of message acceptance or rejection. In addition, the confidence rating is directly related to the average accuracy of message reception. This relationship is relatively invariant over a range of speech-to-noise ratios.