Neuropsychology, neurophysiology, neurophilosophy and neurobiology are only few of the many branches of the multi-disciplinary science called Neuroscience. Scientists from different disciplines like psychology, philosophy, medicine, biology, chemistry, computer science, mathematics and physics have a common goal: understand the brain/mind and the nervous system. There are two categories: the experimentalists and the theoreticians. Nowadays, the majority of the theoreticians belong to the Computational Neuroscience branch. We present one research paradigm of this field: Perceptual Bistability, a visual phenomenon that appears when an unchanged stimulus supports two distinct interpretations and perception alternates between them. It is related to decision-making tasks and can be studied within this framework. Our theoretical/computational investigation is driven by the examination of and comparison with all types of experimental data, using numerical and analytical tools, models based on known neuronal properties. Our goal is to find the underlying mechanisms of such decision-making tasks and characterise the way to make rapid decisions leading into successful actions.
poster for ESOF 2010 http://www.esof2010.org/
