Topic: false alarms

Local stimulation in high-level cortical visual areas perturbs the contents of visual perception. Understanding how the contents of perception are altered by cortical stimulation is necessary for characterizing visual hallucinations in mental disorders and developing visual prosthetics. Anecdotal verbal reports by human patients constitute the main body of evidence in this area of research. The absence of speaking ability in nonhuman primates severely limits the systematic and high-throughput study of stimulation-induced perceptual events. Here we introduce a novel methodology, perceptography

Decisions are often biased by implicit or explicit preferences for one response alternative over another. Recent work suggests that such decision biases are influenced by task-evoked (phasic) increases in neuromodulation, as measured by pupil size, in line with theories proposing that neuromodulatory systems may regulate the balance between bottom-up and top-down processes. Although intriguing, there is scarce causal evidence tying neuromodulator activity to decision biases. Here, we manipulated decision bias through non-monetary punishments to specific errors (false alarms or misses) while up