Increasing body of psychophysical evidence supports the view of human perception as probabilistic inference that relies on representations of uncertainty about sensory stimuli and that is appropriate for statistically optimal decision making and learning. A recent proposal concerning the neural bases of these representations posits that instantaneous neural activity corresponds to samples from the probability distribution it represents. Since these samples are drawn sequentially, a crucial implication of such sampling-based representations is that precision of representing uncertainty will depend on the time available. To test this implication we created an orientation- matching task in which the subjects were presented several differently oriented line segments. We measured both subjects’ performance and their level of uncertainty as they matched the orientation of a randomly chosen element from the previously presented stimulus. We varied the stimulus presentation time trial-to-trial to influence the number of samples available before making a decision. We found that subjects’ performance and uncertainty judgment were correlated. Importantly, with decreasing the presentation time this correlation decreased significantly while the performance levels did not change. Thus, limiting the available time specifically influences the reliability of uncertainty representation, in agreement with sampling-based representations of uncertainty in the cortex