Concept: Imperfect sensory information.
Source: A Nature News & Views, referencing recent original research from Science (April 5, 2013).
- Background: Previous work proved that there is noise in decision making, leaving open the question as to the noise’s source (e.g. sensory organ, ability to accumulate information, biases, strategy for estimating information importance).
- Methods: New experiment simply tasked rats and humans to determine whether more sound clicks arrived from two bursts, one from each of left and right. Researchers could, for example, rule out muddling or forgetting as noise sources by manipulating the duration of the task and comparing with performance.
- Result: Major source of error is from imperfect sensory evidence, i.e. the brain already receives flawed information; i.e. not a cognitive failure. Also, the lack of muddling or perfecting for tasks that were several seconds long indicates a neuronal network that keeps the memory of (early) sensory evidence over time.
- Future research: Explore error-source for other tasks, e.g. value-based decision-making. Explore multi-sensory decision-making.
