Connectionists: new paper: the time course of perceptual discrimination

[Emilio Salinas]

Dear Colleagues,

I would like to draw your attention to the following paper:

Perceptual decision making in less than 30 milliseconds
Nature Neuroscience [Epub ahead of print] 
DOI: 10.1038/nn.2485

by Terry Stanford, Swetha Shankar, Dino Massoglia, Gaby Costello and Emilio Salinas

The paper can be viewed and downloaded from the following location:
http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nn.2485.html

If you are interested but do not have access to this site, please contact me requesting a pdf reprint.

ABSTRACT

In perceptual discrimination tasks, a subject's response time is determined both by sensory and motor processes. Measuring the time consumed by the perceptual evaluation step alone is thus complicated by factors such as motor preparation, task difficulty and speed-accuracy tradeoffs. Here we present a task design that minimizes these confounds and allows us to track a subject's perceptual performance with unprecedented temporal resolution. We find that monkeys can make accurate color discriminations in less than 30 ms. Furthermore, our simple task design provides a novel tool for elucidating how neuronal activity relates to sensory versus motor processing, as demonstrated with neural data from cortical oculomotor neurons. In these cells, perceptual information acts by accelerating and decelerating the ongoing motor plans associated with correct and incorrect choices, as predicted by a race-to-threshold model, and the time course of these neural events parallels the time course of the subject's choice accuracy.

Comments are welcome. Cheers,

	Emilio

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Emilio Salinas
Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy
Wake Forest University School of Medicine
Winston-Salem NC 27157
Phone: (336) 713-5176
Fax: (336) 716-4534
e-mail: esalinas at wfubmc.edu
http://www.wfubmc.edu/Faculty/Salinas-Emilio.htm
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