[ad_1]
The mental process of collecting data to make decisions takes at least several seconds, which is much longer than the time required for the treatment of information by individual brain cells. A team of neuroscientists has demonstrated that this imbalance does not prevent us from making specific choices, indicating that the brain was able to retain relevant information for decision-making over a long period of time.
The lead author of the study, Michael Waskom, is a postdoctoral fellow at The University of New York (NYU).
"Humans can accurately integrate information they encounter over long periods of time, showing that decision-making is not fundamentally limited by forgetfulness or" noise "in our memory," said Waskom. .
Professor Roozbeh Kiani, lead author of the study, added, "If the loss of information is not inevitable, which means that we can keep the information longer than expected, we can start looking for ways to reduce the mistakes we make in our decisions. What appears to be inaccurate decision-making because of the loss of information can instead be caused by suboptimal strategies, and these can be improved. "
Previous studies of the decision-making process focused on rapid decisions based on information collected in a few hundred milliseconds. The simulations suggested that any longer deliberation would have allowed the interference of memory loss and noise, leading to bad decisions.
In everyday life, however, we usually need more than a few hundred milliseconds to make choices. This means that existing research may not capture brain function during this process. Ultimately, previous studies may underestimate our ability to retain information critical to decision-making.
To investigate, the NYU team developed a trial in which participants made decisions regarding the appearance of variable contrast synthetic images. After viewing a series of images, participants had to decide whether their contrast was high or low on average, which required them to integrate the information collected at different times.
Each image in the series was followed by a delay of two to eight seconds, and it took up to 30 seconds for all relevant details to be displayed. Regardless of the length of time they had to wait between images, participants responded correctly, indicating that the passage of time did not interfere with their accuracy.
Professor Kiani concluded, "Our results contradict the predictions of many existing models and favor largely invariant models over time. This will target our search for the neural circuits that underlie real-world decisions. "
The study is published in the journal Current biology.
–
By Chrissy Sexton, Earth.com Editor
[ad_2]
Source link
