Helmholtz lecture 14/9/2018: Janneke Jehee, Uncertainty in perceptual decision-making

Janneke Jehee,  Visual Computation Lab, Center for Cognitive Neuroimaging, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

“Uncertainty in perceptual decision-making”

Virtually anything we sense, think and do is uncertain. For instance, when driving a car, you often need to determine how close you are to the car in front of you. It is near impossible to estimate this distance with absolute certainty – but it is possible to guess and even to estimate the uncertainty associated with that guess. Accordingly, we reduce speed when driving at night, because we realize perceived distance is more uncertain in the dark than on a sunny, clear day. How do we infer that visual information is less reliable at night? How does the brain represent knowledge of sensory uncertainty? In this talk, I will present recent neuroimaging data combined with novel analysis tools to address these questions. Our results indicate that perceptual uncertainty can reliably be estimated from the human visual cortex on a trial-by-trial basis, and moreover that observers appear to take this uncertainty into account when making perceptual decisions