title: Paradoxical evidence integration in rapid decision processes.
abstract: Decisions about noisy stimuli require evidence integration over time. Traditionally, evidence integration and decision making are described as a one-stage process: a decision is made when evidence for the presence of a stimulus crosses a threshold. Here, we show that one-stage models cannot explain psychophysical experiments on feature fusion, where two visual stimuli are presented in rapid succession. Paradoxically, the second stimulus biases decisions more strongly than the first one, contrary to predictions of one-stage models and intuition. We present a two-stage model where sensory information is integrated and buffered before it is fed into a drift diffusion process. The model is tested in a series of psychophysical experiments and explains both accuracy and reaction time distributions.
authors.affiliation: Laboratory of Psychophysics, Brain Mind Institute, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland. johannes.rueter@gmail.com
authors.forename: Johannes
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Rüter
authors.forename: Nicolas
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Marcille
authors.forename: Henning
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Sprekeler
authors.forename: Wulfram
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Gerstner
authors.forename: Michael H
authors.initials: MH
authors.lastname: Herzog
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000465:Algorithms; D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods; D003657:Decision Making; D004058:Diffusion; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D015588:Observer Variation; D011930:Reaction Time; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012984:Software; D013997:Time Factors