Limitation of switching sensory information flow in flexible perceptual decision making.

ABSTRACT: Humans can flexibly change rules to categorize sensory stimuli, but their performance degrades immediately after a task switch. This switch cost is believed to reflect a limitation in cognitive control, although the bottlenecks remain controversial. Here, we show that humans exhibit a brief reduction in the efficiency of using sensory inputs to form a decision after a rule change. Participants classified face stimuli based on one of two rules, switching every few trials. Psychophysical reverse correlation and computational modeling reveal a reduction in sensory weighting, which recovers within a few hundred milliseconds after stimulus presentation. This reduction depends on the sensory features being switched, suggesting a constraint in routing the sensory information flow. We propose that

SUBMITTER: Luo T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11696174 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature