Abstract
Recent psychophysical and modeling studies have revealed that sensorimotor reference frame transformations (RFTs) add variability to motor output by decreasing the fidelity of sensory signals. How RFT stochasticity affects the sensory input underlying perceptual decisions, if at all, is unknown. To investigate this, we asked participants to perform a simple two-alternative motion direction discrimination task under varying conditions of head roll and/or stimulus rotation while responding either with a saccade or button press, allowing us to attribute behavioral effects to eye-, head- and shoulder-centered reference frames. We observed a rotation-induced, increase in reaction time and decrease in accuracy, indicating a degradation of motion evidence commensurate with a decrease in motion strength. Inter-participant differences in performance were best explained by a continuum of eye-head-shoulder representations of accumulated decision evidence, with eye- and shoulder-centered preferences during saccades and button presses, respectively. We argue that perceptual decision making and stochastic RFTs are inseparable, consistent with electrophysiological recordings in neural areas thought to be encoding sensorimotor signals for perceptual decisions. Furthermore, transformational stochasticity appears to be a generalized phenomenon, applicable throughout the perceptual and motor systems. We show for the first time that, by simply rolling one's head, perceptual decision making is impaired in a way that is captured by stochastic RFTs.
