Two publications that track the perceptual decision making process from the sensory receptors to the final action came out in Current Biology. In the studies, done by Yanfang Zuo and Mathew Diamond, rats were trained to identify textures by palpation with their whiskers; the work shows that the brain compares the incoming sensory evidence in favor of competing percepts and expresses a decision as soon as the total acquired evidence for one choice reaches a fixed boundary.

The first paper is "Rats generate vibrissal sensory evidence until boundary-crossing triggers a decision" and the second is "Texture identification by bounded integration of sensory cortical signal."

A summary on the main SISSA website is available

Zuo is currently at the Institute of Neuroscience of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai. Her work as a postdoc at SISSA led (so far) to 3 papers in Current Biology, 1 in PLoS Biology, and 1 in Philosophical Transactions Royal Society. Not too shabby!