Some rats take more time to make easier perceptual decisions

Abstract

When subjects control the duration of sampling a sensory stimulus before making a decision, they generally take more time to make more difficult sensory discriminations. This has been found to be true of many rats performing visual tasks. But two rats performing visual motion discrimination were found to have inverted chronometric response functions: their average response time paradoxically increased with stimulus strength. We hypothesize that corrective decision reversals may underlie this unexpected observation.