An MEG Study of Response Latency and Variability in the Human Visual System During a Visual-Motor Integration Task

Human reaction times during sensory-motor tasks vary considerably. To begin to understand how this variability arises, we examined neuronal populational response time variability at early versus late visual processing stages. The conventional view is that precise temporal information is gradually lost as information is passed through a layered network of mean-rate "units." We tested in humans whether neuronal populations at different processing stages behave like mean-rate "units". A blind source separation algorithm was applied to MEG signals from sensory-motor integration tasks. Response time latency and variability for multiple visual sources were estimated by detecting single-trial stimulus-locked events for each source. In two subjects tested on four visual reaction time tasks, we reliably identified sources belonging to early and late visual processing stages. The standard deviation of response latency was smaller for early rather than late processing stages. This supports the hypothesis that human populational response time variability increases from early to late visual processing stages.