Recent research has suggested that people make physical
predictions based on extrapolation from a noisy representation
of the world, which gives rise to a probabilistic distribution
over possible future worlds. But can people use the
uncertainty of their predictions to inform their decisions, or
can people access only a single possible future? Here we
demonstrate that confidence-sensitive decisions about the
future track the amount of uncertainty expected from
probabilistic forward extrapolations. Participants were asked
to make predictions about where a ball would go and indicate
an expected range around that prediction. This range was well
correlated with two measures of uncertainty: variability in
predictions across participants and the amount of uncertainty
expected by a model of physical prediction. This suggests that
people form a probabilistic distribution over possible futures
in the course of physical prediction and base their decisions
about the future on this range.