Luo Tianlin, Xu Mengya, Zheng Zhihao, Okazawa Gouki
Institute of Neuroscience, Key Laboratory of Brain Cognition and Brain-Inspired Intelligence Technology, Center for Excellence in Brain Science and Intelligence Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, 200031, China.
University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China.
Nat Commun. 2025 Jan 2;16(1):172. doi: 10.1038/s41467-024-55686-w.
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 decision-making circuits cannot fully adjust their sensory readout based on a context cue alone, but require the presence of an actual stimulus to tune it, leading to a limitation in flexible perceptual decision making.
人类能够灵活地改变规则对感官刺激进行分类，但在任务切换后，他们的表现会立即下降。尽管瓶颈问题仍存在争议，但这种切换成本被认为反映了认知控制的局限性。在这里，我们表明，人类在规则改变后，利用感官输入形成决策的效率会出现短暂下降。参与者根据两条规则之一对面部刺激进行分类，每隔几次试验切换一次规则。心理物理学反向关联和计算建模揭示了感官权重的降低，这种降低在刺激呈现后几百毫秒内恢复。这种降低取决于所切换的感官特征，这表明在引导感官信息流方面存在限制。我们提出，决策电路不能仅根据上下文线索完全调整其感官读出，而是需要实际刺激的存在来对其进行调整，这导致了灵活感知决策的局限性。
