Continuous evolution of statistical estimators for optimal decision-making.

ABSTRACT: In many everyday situations, humans must make precise decisions in the presence of uncertain sensory information. For example, when asked to combine information from multiple sources we often assign greater weight to the more reliable information. It has been proposed that statistical-optimality often observed in human perception and decision-making requires that humans have access to the uncertainty of both their senses and their decisions. However, the mechanisms underlying the processes of uncertainty estimation remain largely unexplored. In this paper we introduce a novel visual tracking experiment that requires subjects to continuously report their evolving perception of the mean and uncertainty of noisy visual cues over time. We show that subjects accumulate sensory information over

SUBMITTER: Saunders I 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3382620 | biostudies-literature | 2012

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature