Perceptual Discrimination in Static and Dynamic Noise: The Temporal Relation Between Perceptual Encoding and Decision Making

Abstract

The authors report 9 new experiments and reanalyze 3 published experiments that investigate factors affecting the time course of perceptual processing and its effects on subsequent decision making. Stimuli in letter-discrimination and brightness-discrimination tasks were degraded with static and dynamic noise. The onset and the time course of decision making were quantified by fitting the data with the diffusion model. Dynamic noise and, to a lesser extent, static noise, produced large shifts in the leading edge of the response-time distribution in letter discrimination but had little effect in brightness discrimination. The authors interpret these shifts as changes in the onset of decision ..