Cornelius Schwarz

Single-unit recordings conducted during perceptual decision-making tasks have yielded tremendous insights into the neural coding of sensory stimuli. In such experiments, detection or discrimination behavior (the psychometric data) is observed in parallel with spike trains in sensory neurons (the neurometric data). Frequently, candidate neural codes for information read-out are pitted against each other by transforming the neurometric data in some way and asking which code’s performance most closely approximates the psychometric performance. The code that matches the psychometric performance best is retained as a viable candidate and the others are rejected. In following this strategy, psychometric data is often considered to provide an unbiased measure of perceptual sensitivity. It is rarely acknowledged that psychometric data result from a complex interplay of sensory and non-sensory processes and that neglect of these processes may result in misestimating psychophysical sensitivity. This again may lead to erroneous conclusions regarding the adequacy of candidate neural codes. In this review, we first discuss requirements on the neural data for a subsequent neurometric-psychometric comparison. We then focus on different psychophysical tasks for the assessment of detection and discrimination performance and the cognitive processes that may underlie their execution. We discuss further factors that may compromise psychometric performance and how they can be detected or avoided. We believe that these considerations point to shortcomings in our understanding of the processes underlying perceptual decisions, and therefore offer potential for future research.

Tactile exploration often involves sequential touches interspersed with stimulus-free durations. Whereas it is obvious that texture-related perceptual variables, irrespective of the encoding strategy, must be stored in memory for comparison, it is rather unclear which of those variables are held in memory. There are two established variables—“intensity” and “frequency”, which are “temporally global” variables because of the long stimulus integration interval required to average the signal or derive spectral components, respectively; on the other hand, a recently established third contender is the “temporally local” variable that codes for kinematic profiles of very short, suprathreshold events in the vibrotactile signal. Here, we present the first psychophysical evidence that temporally local variables can be stored in memory. To that end, we asked participants to detect changes in pulsatile indentation stimuli at their fingertips with and without a gap of 1 s between stimulus presentations. The stimuli either contained global variables alone, or a mix of local and global variables. We found, first, that humans are much better at detecting a change in stimuli when local variables are available rather than global ones alone—as evident by the fact that 21 compared to only 6 participants out of 25 yielded a valid psychophysical curve, respectively. Second, this observation persists even when there is a gap between the stimuli, implying local variables must be stored in memory. Third, an extensive array of relevant intensity definitions failed to explain participants’ performance in any consistent manner, which implies that perceptual decisions were less likely to be driven by intensity coding. Taken together, our results suggest that humans perform pulsatile change detection utilizing local pulse shape, and to a lesser degree global pulse rate, and that both parameters can be stored in memory.

The tidal-wave theory is inspired by the particular morphology of the cerebellar cortex. It elegantly attributes function to the anisotropy of the cerebellar wiring and the geometry of Purkinje cell dendrites. In this commentary, physiological considerations are used to elaborate temporal and spatial constraints of the tidal-wave theory. It is shown, first, that limitations of temporal precision in the cortical inputs to the mammalian cerebellum delimit the spatial resolution of an input sequence (i.e., the minimal distance along the parallel fibers which can detect sequential input) to the range of a millimeter at best. Second, temporal characteristics of Purkinje cell postsynaptic potentials are argued to predict a distance of at least several millimeters along the parallel fiber beam in order to generate a sequence in the cerebellar output. It is concluded that the implementation of tidal waves as a general principle of cerebellar function is questionable as there exist cerebelli too small to match these constraints