Topic: perceptual decision-making

Neural activity is often analyzed with respect to external referents, such as the onset of a sensory stimulus or an overt motor action. Simultaneous recordings allow referencing neurons’ activity to each other and thus detecting signals that are internal to the organism. Further, multi-region simultaneous recordings allow observing how these internal signals are coordinated across the brain. Following this logic in rats performing a perceptual decision-making task, we recorded simultaneously from thousands of neurons across up to 20 brain regions at once. Here we report two internal signals wh

Background and Objectives. Predictive coding theory proposes that perceptual experience arises from the integrations between subjective (e.g., prior) and objective reality (e.g., visual input). The purpose of the present work was to map the behavioural and electrophysiological mechanisms behind the integration of prior knowledge into human perceptual decision-making. Methods. We employed computational (signal detection theory, drift diffusion model) and electrophysiological (time-frequency decomposition) analyses to explore the impact that prior information has on perceptual decision. To this

Classical models of perceptual decision-making assume that animals use a single, consistent strategy to integrate sensory evidence and form decisions during an experiment. In this talk, I aim to convince you that this common view is incorrect. I will show results from applying a latent variable framework, the “GLM-HMM”, to hundreds of thousands of trials of mouse choice data. Our analysis reveals that mice don’t lapse. Instead, mice switch back and forth between engaged and disengaged behavior within a single session, and each mode of behavior lasts tens to hundreds of trials.

To make judgments, brain must be able to infer the state of the world based on often incomplete and ambiguous evidence. To probe neural circuits that perform the computations underlying such judgments, we developed a behavioral task for mice that required them to detect sustained increases in the speed of a continuously varying visual stimulus. In this talk, I will present evidence that the responses of secondary motor cortex to stimulus fluctuations in this task are consistent with updates of the animal’s state of belief that the change has occurred. These results establish a framework for me

Ongoing neural activity fluctuates over a broad range of timescales. Variations in intrinsic timescales across the forebrain relate to the functional specialization of cortical areas along the visual hierarchy [1, 2]. Furthermore, these timescales adapt to task demands, for example, during selective attention [3] and working memory [4] tasks. However, the distribution of timescales and their relationship to brain structure and behavior have not been characterized beyond the forebrain, despite the evolutionary relevance of midbrain and hindbrain areas. These areas are preserved across different

The visual system processes vast amounts of information by internally weighting stimulus inputs based on their local features and behavioral relevance [1]. Although evidence shows that behavioral relevance influences stimulus saliency, it is not well understood how integrating stimulus and social information impacts perception and decision-making. Previous studies indicate that predicting others’ actions improves with real-time observation of their movements [3]. Additionally, game-theoretic simulations show that real-time feedback leads to leader-follower behavior, where one agent acts and t

Perceptual decision-making involves interpreting sensory information to guide actions. Incoming sensory information must often be assessed in the context of other relevant information held in working memory. Despite this interdependence, the neural basis of working memory and perceptual decision-making have largely been studied separately. Thus, how the brain flexibly combines sensory information with information in memory to form decisions remains unknown. To study this interaction, we developed a novel behavioral task in which monkeys hold a set of color images in working memory as context,

In a complex and mutable environment, animals continuously face scenarios where behavioral decisions determine their survival. These rely primarily on sensory input and the associated cognitive process is known as perceptual decision-making. The decision-making is typically preceded by the gathering of information across time in a process called evidence accumulation. This has been widely studied on various animals; however, in flies, the emphasis has primarily been centered on the subcellular integration mechanisms, overlooking the behavioral impacts and whole-brain neuronal dynamics.Here, we