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Seeing at a glance, smelling in a whiff: rapid forms of perceptual decision making

Nature Reviews Neuroscience volume 7, pages 485–491 (2006)Cite this article

Abstract

Intuitively, decisions should always improve with more time for the accumulation of evidence, yet psychophysical data show a limit of 200–300 ms for many perceptual tasks. Here, we consider mechanisms that favour such rapid information processing in vision and olfaction. We suggest that the brain limits some types of perceptual processing to short, discrete chunks (for example, eye fixations and sniffs) in order to facilitate the construction of global sensory images.

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Figure 1: Integrator model.
Figure 2: Mechanisms that may limit the timescale or effectiveness of temporal integration.
Figure 3: Discrete sampling of sensory information in vision and olfaction.

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Acknowledgements

We thank M. R. DeWeese for discussions and comments on an earlier version of this manuscript. The original research of the authors was supported by a grant from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (Z.F.M.) and fellowships from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Association (N.U.) and the Swartz foundation (Z.F.M., N.U. and A.K.).

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  1. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, 1 Bungtown Road, Cold Spring Harbor, 11724, New York, USA

    Naoshige Uchida, Adam Kepecs & Zachary F. Mainen

  2. the Center for Brain Science and Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Harvard University, 16 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge, 02138, Massachusetts, USA

    Naoshige Uchida

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Uchida, N., Kepecs, A. & Mainen, Z. Seeing at a glance, smelling in a whiff: rapid forms of perceptual decision making. Nat Rev Neurosci 7, 485–491 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn1933

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