Temporal oscillations in human perception

An experiment to assess whether perceptual decisions made by humans use discrete processing as opposed to continuous accumulation, found responses began following between four and seven stages of discrete processing. Reaction time distributions involved a periodic structure which could be described as fine grained, while oscillation periods tended to be linked to how difficult tasks were. The common assumption is that processing involves an important stochastic element, varying continuously. The research involved the study of 1,600 response times in four different tasks.