Topic: two-alternative forced choice

Metacognition has long been defined as “cognition about cognition”. One of its aspects is the error monitoring ability, which includes being aware of one’s own errors without external feedback. This ability is mostly investigated in two-alternative forced choice tasks, where the performance has all or none nature in terms of accuracy. The previous literature documents the effect of different influences on the error monitoring ability, such as working memory, feedback and sensorimotor involvement. However, these demonstrations fall short of generalizing to the real life scenarios where the erro

The brain is efficient to categorize continuous sensory inputs into discrete perceptions to aid efficient action. The brain-wide neural mechanism underlying this sensory-to-categorical transformation remains elusive. Here we recorded brain-wide neuronal activity by Neuropixels probes in mice performing a two-alternative forced choice (2AFC) odor categorization task, using different combinations of odor mixtures. Mixtures of two pure odors were delivered at different ratios, and the left or right lick decision after a delay period should be based on the category defined by the dominant odor. Mi

Learning is not only the acquisition of knowledge, but also the ability to express that knowledge when needed. Previous work using non-reinforced probe trials showed that animals exhibit complete acquisition of stimulus-action associations far before they express them under reinforcement. Why do animals exhibit this gap in performance between acquisition and expression despite already acquiring the stimulus-action associations? Early in learning, animals may (1) exhibit motor biases that they slowly learn to suppress, (2) continue to explore different choice alternatives, or (3) base decisions

Error monitoring refers to the ability to monitor one's own task performance without explicit feedback. This ability is studied typically in two-alternative forced-choice (2AFC) paradigms. Recent research showed that humans can also keep track of the magnitude and direction of errors in different magnitude domains (e.g., numerosity, duration, length). Based on the evidence that suggests a shared mechanism for magnitude representations, we aimed to investigate whether metric error monitoring ability is commonly governed across different magnitude domains. Participants reproduced/estimated tempo

Acting judiciously in an environment requires capitalising on the statistical structure underlying observed stimuli. However, structure is expensive to determine and exploit, so efficient learners should focus exclusively on utility-relevant characteristics. To assess this, we administered a pair of related tasks, the first ('learning') required subjects to determine and exploit relevant, and ignore irrelevant, structure to maximize reward; the second ('read-out') quantified their resulting sensitivity to different structure components. Statistical relationships were realised in sampled three-

Across animal species, novel stimuli elicit arousal and evoke sensory inspection and exploration. This type of spontaneous curiosity critically relies on the animals’ ability to identify the novelty of a sensory stimulus against previously experienced stimuli. However, since familiarity is characterized by the absence of a behavioural responses, passive novelty detection tasks involve asymmetric motor responses which can confound the analysis of neural signals. To address this limitation, I established a two alternative forced choice novelty detection task which offers the opportunity to inves