Sensory noise drives bad decisions

Kaufman, Matthew T.; Churchland, Anne K.

doi:10.1038/496172a

Cited by 15 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…Taken together, however, these aforementioned studies predict that the grouping percept may be mediated in the auditory cortex and frontal activity represents the decision process. A second, alternative explanation is that the decision process may be very flexible and able to efficiently accumulate different forms of noisy evidence under different conditions ( Brunton et al, 2013 ; Kaufman and Churchland, 2013 ). The degree of this flexibility might depend on the type and quality of the sensory information, memory load, the nature of the environment in which the subject is making the decisions, and other task demands.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Temporal Integration of Auditory Information Is Invariant to Temporal Grouping Cues

Liu

Tsunada²,

Gold

et al. 2015

eneuro

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Temporal Integration of Auditory Information Is Invariant to Temporal Grouping Cues

Liu

Tsunada²,

Gold

et al. 2015

eneuro

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“…While the exact cause of neuronal noise is subject to some debate (Beck, Ma, Pitkow, Latham, & Pouget, 2012; reduces the quality of the evidence going into the accumulator in the first place (Brunton et al, 2013;Kaufman & Churchland, 2013;Osborne, Lisberger, & Bialek, 2005;Smith & Ratcli , 2004). Second, noisy action selection causes mistakes to be made even after the integration process is complete (Daw, O'doherty, Dayan, Seymour, & Dolan, 2006;Gri ths & Tenenbaum, 2006;Sutton & Barto, 1998).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Regulation of evidence accumulation by pupil-linked arousal processes

Keung

Hagen

Wilson

2018

Preprint

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Integrating evidence over time is crucial for e ective decision making. For simple perceptual decisions, a large body of work suggests that humans and animals are capable of integrating evidence over time fairly well, but that their performance is far from optimal. This suboptimality is thought to arise from a number of di erent sources including (1) noise in sensory and motor systems, (2) unequal weighting of evidence over time, (3) order e ects from previous trials and (4) irrational side biases for one choice over another. In this work we investigated whether and how these di erent sources of suboptimality are related to pupil dilation, a putative correlate of norepinephrine tone. In particular, we measured pupil response in humans making a series of decisions based on rapidly-presented auditory information in an evidence accumulation task. We found that people exhibited all four types of suboptimality, but that only noise and the uneven weighting of evidence over time, the 'integration kernel', were related to the change in pupil response during the stimulus. Moreover, these two di erent suboptimalities were related to di erent aspects of the pupil signal, with the individual di erences in pupil response associated with individual di erences in integration kernel, while trial-by-trial fluctuations in pupil response were associated with trial-by-trial fluctuations in noise. These results suggest that di erent sources of suboptimality in human perceptual decision making are related to distinct pupil-linked processes possibly related to tonic and phasic norepinephrine activity.

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“…Typically, noise is viewed as being detrimental for neuronal computations and the behaviors they regulate [2, 3], including decision-making [4]. A key limiting factor in decision-making arises from noisy representations of sensory evidence in the brain [5, 6]. On this view, noisy sensory information representations are not optimal, and this leads to errors in decisions.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Making up your mind: Enhanced perceptual decision-making induced by stochastic resonance during non-invasive brain stimulation: Stochastic resonance in perceptual decision-making

Groen

Tang

Wenderoth

et al. 2017

Preprint

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Summary:Perceptual decision-making relies on the gradual accumulation of noisy sensory evidence until a specified boundary is reached and an appropriate response is made. It might be assumed that adding noise to a stimulus, or to the neural systems involved in its processing, would interfere with the decision process. But it has been suggested that adding an optimal amount of noise can, under appropriate conditions, enhance the quality of subthreshold signals in nonlinear systems, a phenomenon known as stochastic resonance. Here we asked whether perceptual decisions obey these stochastic resonance principles by adding noise directly to the visual cortex using transcranial random noise stimulation (tRNS) while participants judged the direction of motion in foveally presented random-dot motion arrays. Consistent with the stochastic resonance account, we found that adding tRNS bilaterally to visual cortex enhanced decision-making when stimuli were just below, but not well below or above, perceptual threshold. We modelled the data under a drift diffusion framework to isolate the specific components of the multi-stage decision process that were influenced by the addition of neural noise. This modelling showed that tRNS increased drift rate, which indexes the rate of evidence accumulation, but had no effect on bound separation or non-decision time. These results were specific to bilateral stimulation of visual cortex; control experiments involving unilateral stimulation of left and right visual areas showed no influence of random noise stimulation. Our study is the first to provide causal evidence that perceptual decision-making is susceptible to a stochastic resonance effect induced by tRNS, and that this effect arises from selective enhancement of the rate of evidence accumulation for sub-threshold sensory events.

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Sensory noise drives bad decisions

Cited by 15 publications

References 11 publications

Temporal Integration of Auditory Information Is Invariant to Temporal Grouping Cues

Temporal Integration of Auditory Information Is Invariant to Temporal Grouping Cues

Regulation of evidence accumulation by pupil-linked arousal processes

Making up your mind: Enhanced perceptual decision-making induced by stochastic resonance during non-invasive brain stimulation: Stochastic resonance in perceptual decision-making

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