Tracking the temporal evolution of a perceptual judgment using a compelled-response task.

Choice behavior and its neural correlates have been intensely studied with tasks in which a subject makes a perceptual judgment and indicates the result with a motor action. Yet a question crucial for relating behavior to neural activity remains unresolved: what fraction of a subject's reaction time (RT) is devoted to the perceptual evaluation step, as opposed to executing the motor report? Making such timing measurements accurately is complicated because RTs reflect both sensory and motor processing, and because speed and accuracy may be traded. To overcome these problems, we designed the compelled-saccade task, a two-alternative forced-choice task in which the instruction to initiate a saccade precedes the appearance of the relevant sensory information. With this paradigm, it is possible to track perceptual performance as a function of the amount of time during which sensory information is available to influence a subject's choice. The result-the tachometric curve-directly reveals a subject's perceptual processing capacity independently of motor demands. Psychophysical data, together with modeling and computer-simulation results, reveal that task performance depends on three separable components: the timing of the motor responses, the speed of the perceptual evaluation, and additional cognitive factors. Each can vary quickly, from one trial to the next, or can show stable, longer-term changes. This novel dissociation between sensory and motor processes yields a precise metric of how perceptual capacity varies under various experimental conditions and serves to interpret choice-related neuronal activity as perceptual, motor, or both.