Department of Neuroscience, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, Texas, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2012;7(6):e40216. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0040216. Epub 2012 Jun 29.
A key function of the brain is to interpret noisy sensory information. To do so optimally, observers must, in many tasks, take into account knowledge of the precision with which stimuli are encoded. In an orientation change detection task, we find that encoding precision does not only depend on an experimentally controlled reliability parameter (shape), but also exhibits additional variability. In spite of variability in precision, human subjects seem to take into account precision near-optimally on a trial-to-trial and item-to-item basis. Our results offer a new conceptualization of the encoding of sensory information and highlight the brain's remarkable ability to incorporate knowledge of uncertainty during complex perceptual decision-making.
大脑的一个关键功能是解释嘈杂的感觉信息。为了最优地完成这一任务，观察者在许多任务中都必须考虑到对刺激进行编码的精度知识。在一个方向变化检测任务中，我们发现编码精度不仅取决于实验控制的可靠性参数（形状），还表现出额外的可变性。尽管精度存在变化，但人类受试者似乎能够在试验和项目基础上近乎最优地考虑精度。我们的结果提供了一种新的感觉信息编码概念化，并强调了大脑在复杂感知决策过程中整合不确定性知识的非凡能力。
