Continuous evolution of statistical estimators for optimal decision-making

• Published in: PloS one Vol. 7; no. 6; p. e37547
• Main Authors: Saunders, Ian, Vijayakumar, Sethu
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Public Library of Science 25.06.2012; Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subjects: Adult; Biological Evolution; Biology; Cues; Decision Making; Decision theory; Decisions; Estimates; Humans; Informatics; Latency; Learning; Mathematical programming; Mathematics; Models, Statistical; Optical tracking; Optimization; Perception; Prostheses; Psychomotor Performance; Sensorimotor system; Statistics; Uncertainty; Visual perception; Visual Perception - physiology; Visual stimuli; Young Adult; Edinburgh Scotland
• ISSN: 1932-6203; 1932-6203
• DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0037547

In many everyday situations, humans must make precise decisions in the presence of uncertain sensory information. For example, when asked to combine information from multiple sources we often assign greater weight to the more reliable information. It has been proposed that statistical-optimality often observed in human perception and decision-making requires that humans have access to the uncertainty of both their senses and their decisions. However, the mechanisms underlying the processes of uncertainty estimation remain largely unexplored. In this paper we introduce a novel visual tracking experiment that requires subjects to continuously report their evolving perception of the mean and uncertainty of noisy visual cues over time. We show that subjects accumulate sensory information over the course of a trial to form a continuous estimate of the mean, hindered only by natural kinematic constraints (sensorimotor latency etc.). Furthermore, subjects have access to a measure of their continuous objective uncertainty, rapidly acquired from sensory information available within a trial, but limited by natural kinematic constraints and a conservative margin for error. Our results provide the first direct evidence of the continuous mean and uncertainty estimation mechanisms in humans that may underlie optimal decision making.