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A study published in Nature Neuroscience on September 10, 2026, found that people and monkeys made less accurate visual judgments when they were uncertain about which task rule to follow. In the experiments, the rule determined which visual feature mattered and which should be ignored. The authors propose that under this kind of uncertainty, information about the irrelevant feature can become more strongly represented and overlap with information about the relevant feature, biasing a decision.
What the researchers tested
Cheng Xue and colleagues studied two visual tasks. Participants had to attend to one feature and disregard another; the rule indicating which feature was relevant could change. The key uncertainty was therefore about which rule applied, not uncertainty in every sense of the word.
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The team combined human psychophysics with neural recordings in monkeys and artificial neural network modeling. They compared a network trained to make correct choices with one trained to reproduce participants’ choices, then examined the proposed feature-interference account in behavioral, physiological and causal experiments.
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Humans and monkeys made less accurate perceptual decisions under uncertain task conditions. Xue and co-authors describe their account in the paper’s abstract: “Through behavioral, physiological and causal experiments, we show that, under uncertain conditions, feature interference causes errors by inducing stronger representations of irrelevant features and entangled neuronal representations of different features.”
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In practical terms, the authors’ interpretation is that information the task says to ignore can still influence the choice when the applicable rule is unclear. Cheng Xue, identified as a co-first author, put it this way in a Medical Xpress report: “When we are unsure which rule applies, the brain holds on to information it should be ignoring.”
What “feature interference” means—and what it does not
In this experiment, the relevant and irrelevant features were visual attributes presented in a task with changing rules. The proposed mechanism is not simply that uncertainty makes the brain notice more things. Rather, the researchers argue that irrelevant-feature representations grow stronger while representations of different features become entangled, allowing the ignored information to bias a perceptual decision.
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This is a mechanistic interpretation supported by the study’s behavioral results, monkey neural recordings, modeling and causal experiments. It should be read as an explanation for errors in this experimental paradigm, not as proof that all distractions, multitasking or everyday choices share the same neural cause.
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“Irrelevant” depends on the task. In the changing-rule experiments, the ignored visual feature could interfere with the judgment. But a 2026 review in the Annual Review of Vision Science cautions that information outside a nominal target can sometimes predict the target and help people select efficiently in natural settings. The distinction is whether the extra information is merely in conflict with the task rule or carries useful, target-predictive signals—and whether the outcome being considered is perceptual accuracy or efficient selection.
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What the study does not quantify here
The accessible abstract and reporting do not provide a sufficiently supported headline effect-size estimate or sample sizes to quote. No percentage or numerical magnitude should be inferred from the finding that accuracy was lower under uncertainty. The study record says the monkey behavioral, electrophysiology and microstimulation data, along with human psychophysics data, are deposited on figshare and that code repositories are provided.
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Paper and sources
- Xue et al., “Feature interference underlies a neuronal basis for the behavioral cost of task uncertainty,” Nature Neuroscience, published September 10, 2026.
- Ingrid Fadelli, Medical Xpress, October 4, 2026, reporting on the study and quoting Cheng Xue.
- Geng, Shomstein, Wan and McEvoy, 2026 review in the Annual Review of Vision Science, on how information beyond a target can sometimes support efficient attention.
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