What Do We Know About Threat-Related Perceptual Decision Making?

The ability to make rapid and precise decisions regarding the presence or absence of threats in the environment is critical for survival. Although threatening stimuli may be detected more accurately and faster because of to the bottom-up salience of their features, in the real world, these stimuli are often encountered in familiar environments in which top-down cues signal their arrival. There has been significant progress in understanding of the mechanisms by which people make perceptual decisions regarding relatively routine stimuli; however, the mechanisms of threat-related perceptual decision making remain unclear. In this review, we discuss the psychological, computational, and neural mechanisms by which information from threatening stimuli is integrated with prior knowledge from cues and surrounding contexts to guide perceptual decision making.