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 consider(cid:173) ably. To begin to understand how this variability arises, we exam(cid:173) ined neuronal populational response time variability at early versus late visual processing stages. The conventional view is that pre(cid:173) cise temporal information is gradually lost as information is passed through a layered network of mean-rate "units." We tested in hu(cid:173) mans 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.