Perceptual and decision confidence must be presented in human-interpretable form

What it is

Human-interpretable confidence communication translates confidence in detection, state estimation, or action selection into a basis for continuing, checking, taking over, or stopping. It does not expose an arbitrary model score; meaning must connect to validated correctness, conditions, and consequences.

Why it happens

Internal uncertainty may be probability, distance, entropy, or ensemble disagreement with incompatible scales. People need a reliance decision. Categories, ranges, language, and action advice compress values and can lose calibration. A monotonic mapping can be learned; frequent confident errors destroy its meaning.

Studying it

Confidence–accuracy calibration should precede comparisons of numbers, intervals, categories, and recommendations on delegation, checking, takeover, time, and over- or under-reliance. Consequence and expertise matter. Reliability diagrams and action-based comprehension are more revealing than average accuracy.

Where it stops holding

Ranking scores are not success probabilities, and out-of-distribution cases can be confidently wrong. High-stakes uncertainty cannot always collapse to one colour. When no human action is available, detail may add anxiety while the system should first act safely.

Applying it

• Document meaning, validation data, and error for each confidence source; do not label uncalibrated scores as percentages.
• Map ranges to continue, slow, resense, confirm, or stop.
• Validate reliability and human delegation curves together, checking whether severe errors cluster under apparently high confidence.

Related

• Same group: X3.08.2 Binary success/failure presentation hides intermediate uncertainty · X3.08.3 Expressing uncertainty should not undermine overall system credibility · X3.08.4 Low-confidence situations should request confirmation rather than execute silently at a threshold
• Adjacent: X3.03 Truthful expression · X3.07 Explainable decision basis
• Search terms: confidence calibration · uncertainty visualization · appropriate reliance