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Reply to 'The unique criterion constraint: a false alarm?'

Nature Neuroscience volume 5, pages 707–708 (2002)Cite this article

REPLY

In our view, the criticism of our work1 from Kontsevich et al. bears on the following two points. First, the observed equality of the false alarm z-scores (zFA) across paired conditions (i,j) does not guarantee our claim of a unique criterion constraint expressed by the equality ci = cj, with ck = zFAkσk (with c the criterion and σ the standard deviation of the noise). Rather, it necessarily implies σi = σj, that is, noise constancy across any conditions i,j. Second, verification of the zFA (rather than c) scores equality for equal baseline conditions (our Fig. 3) does not allow its generalization to unequal baseline conditions; hence zFA scores cannot be compared across baseline levels without an assumption regarding the relative noise values, whose assessment was the purpose of our study.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratoire de Psychologie Expérimentale, CNRS & René Descartes University, Boulogne, 92774, France

    Andrei Gorea

  2. The Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, 76100, Israel

    Dov Sagi

Authors
  1. Andrei Gorea
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  2. Dov Sagi
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Gorea, A., Sagi, D. Reply to 'The unique criterion constraint: a false alarm?'. Nat Neurosci 5, 707–708 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn0802-707b

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