Department of Neurobiology & Anatomy, Wake Forest School of Medicine, Winston-Salem, North Carolina 27157, USA; email:
Annu Rev Vis Sci. 2021 Sep 15;7:323-348. doi: 10.1146/annurev-vision-100419-103842. Epub 2021 Jun 25.
Measuring when exactly perceptual decisions are made is crucial for defining how the activation of specific neurons contributes to behavior. However, in traditional, nonurgent visuomotor tasks, the uncertainty of this temporal measurement is very large. This is a problem not only for delimiting the capacity of perception, but also for correctly interpreting the functional roles ascribed to choice-related neuronal responses. In this article, we review psychophysical, neurophysiological, and modeling work based on urgent visuomotor tasks in which this temporal uncertainty can be effectively overcome. The cornerstone of this work is a novel behavioral metric that describes the evolution of the subject's perceptual judgment moment by moment, allowing us to resolve numerous perceptual events that unfold within a few tens of milliseconds. In this framework, the neural distinction between perceptual evaluation and motor selection processes becomes particularly clear, as the conclusion of one is not contingent on that of the other.
测量感知决策的确切时刻对于确定特定神经元的激活如何有助于行为至关重要。然而,在传统的非紧急视觉运动任务中,这种时间测量的不确定性非常大。这不仅是限制感知能力的问题,也是正确解释与选择相关的神经元反应所赋予的功能角色的问题。在本文中,我们回顾了基于紧急视觉运动任务的心理物理学、神经生理学和建模工作,这些任务可以有效地克服这种时间不确定性。这项工作的基石是一种新的行为度量标准,它描述了主体的感知判断随时间的演变,使我们能够解析在几十毫秒内展开的许多感知事件。在这个框架中,感知评估和运动选择过程之间的神经区别变得特别清晰,因为一个过程的结论不依赖于另一个过程的结论。