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Cognitive neuroscience

Sensory noise drives bad decisions

The philosopher Albert Camus once said, “Life is the sum of all your choices”. Work using an innovative experimental design in humans and rats shows that many of the errors in those choices come from the senses, not from cognition.

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Figure 1: Errors in decision-making.

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Correspondence to Anne K. Churchland.

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Kaufman, M., Churchland, A. Sensory noise drives bad decisions. Nature 496, 172–173 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/496172a

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