Visual decisions in the presence of measurement and stimulus correlations

DOI10.1162/NECO_A_00778MaRDI QIDQ5380344zbMATH OpenOpenAlexWikidataFDO

Authors Manisha Bhardwaj, Samuel R. Carroll, Wei Ji Ma, Krešimir Josić

Publication date 4 June 2019

Published in Neural Computation (Search for Journal in Brave)

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/1503.01216

zbMATH Keywords

perceptual measurement noisestatistical structure of stimulistimulus correlationsvisual decisions

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Applications of statistics to biology and medical sciences; meta analysis (62P10) Neural networks for/in biological studies, artificial life and related topics (92B20)

Abstract: Humans and other animals base their decisions on noisy sensory input. Much work has therefore been devoted to understanding the computations that underly such decisions. The problem has been studied in a variety of tasks and with stimuli of differing complexity. However, the impact of correlations in sensory noise on perceptual judgments is not well understood. Here we examine how stimulus correlations together with correlations in sensory noise impact decision making. As an example, we consider the task of detecting the presence of a single or multiple targets amongst distractors. We assume that both the distractors and the observer's measurements of the stimuli are correlated. The computations of an optimal observer in this task are nontrivial, yet can be analyzed and understood intuitively. We find that when distractors are strongly correlated, measurement correlations can have a strong impact on performance. When distractor correlations are weak, measurement correlations have little impact, unless the number of stimuli is large. Correlations in neural responses to structured stimuli can therefore strongly impact perceptual judgments.

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Cites work

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Cited in

(6)

• Information in channel-coded systems: Correlated receivers
• Detection of sinusoidal gratings by pattern-specific detectors: further evidence for the correlation principle in human vision
• scientific article; zbMATH DE number 3860953 (Why is no real title available?)
• Optimal readout of correlated neural activity in a decision-making circuit
• Stochastic characterization of small-scale algorithms for human sensory processing
• A note on decomposition of sources of variability in perceptual decision-making

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