Distinct signatures of subjective confidence and objective accuracy in speech prosody

Whether speech prosody truly and naturally reflects a speaker's subjective confidence, rather than other dimensions such as objective accuracy, is unclear. Here, using new approach combing psychophysics with acoustic analysis automatic classification of verbal reports, we tease apart the contributions sensory evidence, confidence to prosody. We find that accuracy are distinctly reflected in loudness, duration intonation reports. Strikingly, show encoded beyond their own metacognitive awareness, it can be automatically decoded from this information alone performances up 60%. These findings demonstrate have separable prosodic signatures manifested different timings, on dimensions. Thus, both mental states related competence, directly inferred natural behavior.