PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Long Luu
AU  - Cheng Qiu
AU  - Alan A. Stocker
TI  - High- to low-level decoding does not generally improve perceptual performance
AID  - 10.1101/240390
DP  - 2017 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 240390
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/12/29/240390.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/12/29/240390.full
AB  - Ding et al. (1) recently proposed that the brain automatically encodes high-level, relative stimulus information (i.e. the ordinal relation between two lines), which it then uses to constrain the decoding of low-level, absolute stimulus features (i.e. when recalling the actual lines orientation). This is an interesting idea that is in line with the self-consistent Bayesian observer model (2, 3) and may have important implications for understanding how the brain processes sensory information. However, the notion suggested in Ding et al. (1) that the brain uses this decoding strategy because it improves perceptual performance is misleading. Here we clarify the decoding model and compare its perceptual performance under various noise and signal conditions.