Decision making

Erroneous decision? Blame noisy information, not your brain

April 17, 2013

Rat auditory task: poke the left or right port to indicate which side played more clicks (credit: B. W. Brunton et al./Science)

Princeton University researchers have found that making an erroneous decision is caused by errors, or “noise,” in the information coming into your brain, rather than errors in how your brain accumulates or processes that information.

The researchers separated sensory inputs from the internal mental process. ”To our great surprise, the internal mental process was perfectly noiseless. All of the imperfections came from noise in the sensory processes,” said senior investigator Carlos Brody, a Princeton associate professor of molecular biology and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute (PNI), and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator./.../