On 2017 Jun 22, Lydia Maniatis commented:

This study is an exercise in generating and crunching numbers following a 50-year-old recipe containing many untested and implausible assumptions, i.e. Green and Swets (1966) analogizing of perception to signal detection. I've commented on this issue in detail in a number of PubPeer/PubMedCommons on other articles.

I'll just make one additional comment here. In the Appendix, we're casually informed, as a preliminary, that:

"All targets were assumed to be known to the ideal observer."

In what sense is this omniscient-homunculus-assumption related to human perception? What is the neuroscientific theory behind it, and what is the relationship of this homunculus to the processes doing the "detecting and discriminating?" In other words, what is the relevance of the "ideal observer model" other than to provide an arbitrary value with which to compare the human data?

(Also, what does it mean, exactly, that the targets were "known" to the ideal observer? What does this knowing consist of?)

On 2017 Jun 22, Lydia Maniatis commented:

This study is an exercise in generating and crunching numbers following a 50-year-old recipe containing many untested and implausible assumptions, i.e. Green and Swets (1966) analogizing of perception to signal detection. I've commented on this issue in detail in a number of PubPeer/PubMedCommons on other articles.

I'll just make one additional comment here. In the Appendix, we're casually informed, as a preliminary, that:

"All targets were assumed to be known to the ideal observer."

In what sense is this omniscient-homunculus-assumption related to human perception? What is the neuroscientific theory behind it, and what is the relationship of this homunculus to the processes doing the "detecting and discriminating?" In other words, what is the relevance of the "ideal observer model" other than to provide an arbitrary value with which to compare the human data?

(Also, what does it mean, exactly, that the targets were "known" to the ideal observer? What does this knowing consist of?)