Quantized response times are a signature of a neuronal bottleneck in decision.
The histograms of response times of optimal YES/NO decisions that are computed from a single sensory Poisson neuron are highly structured. In particular, response times in NO decisions are quantized to a small set of times, while response times in YES decisions have a multimodal structure. Both the times of NO decisions, as well as the modes of the the histogram of YES decisions, are associated to the number of action potentials that were necessary to reach the decision. Their value is a function of the firing rate of the neuron in response to the states of the stimulus.
Department of Electrical Engineering and of Computation and Neural Systems, California Institute of Technology Pasadena, CA, USA.
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SPRT; decision; ideal observer model; poisson neurons; response time distributions; response time modeling; sequential probability ratio test