Perceptual decision making in less than 30 milliseconds

In perceptual discrimination tasks, a subject’s response time is determined both by sensory and motor processes. Measuring the time consumed by the perceptual evaluation step alone is thus complicated by factors such as motor preparation, task difficulty and speed-accuracy tradeoffs. Here we present a task design that minimizes these confounds and allows us to track a subject’s perceptual performance with unprecedented temporal resolution. We find that monkeys can make accurate color discriminations in less than 30 ms. Furthermore, our simple task design provides a novel tool for elucidating how neuronal activity relates to sensory versus motor processing, as demonstrated with neural data from cortical oculomotor neurons. In these cells, perceptual information acts by accelerating and decelerating the ongoing motor plans associated with correct and incorrect choices, as predicted by a race-to-threshold model, and the time course of these neural events parallels the time course of the subject's choice accuracy.