Direct observation of the neural computations underlying a single decision

bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)(2022)

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摘要
Neurobiological investigations of perceptual decision-making have furnished the first glimpse of a flexible cognitive process at the level of single neurons ( Shadlen and Newsome, 1996 ; Shadlen and Kiani, 2013 ). Neurons in the parietal and prefrontal cortex ( Kim and Shadlen, 1999 ; Romo et al., 2004 ; Hernández et al., 2002 ; Ding and Gold, 2012 ) are thought to represent the accumulation of noisy evidence, acquired over time, leading to a decision. Neural recordings averaged over many decisions have provided support for the deterministic rise in activity to a termination bound ( Roitman and Shadlen, 2002 ). Critically, it is the unobserved stochastic component that is thought to confer variability in both choice and decision time ( Gold and Shadlen, 2007 ). Here, we elucidate this drift-diffusion-like signal on individual decisions by recording simultaneously from hundreds of neurons in the lateral intraparietal cortex (LIP). We show that a single scalar quantity derived from the weighted sum of the population activity represents a combination of deterministic drift and stochastic diffusion. Moreover, we provide direct support for the hypothesis that this drift-diffusion signal is the quantity responsible for the variability in choice and reaction times. The population-derived signals rely on a small subset of neurons with response fields that overlap the choice targets. These neurons represent the integral of noisy evidence from direction-selective neurons within LIP itself. This parsimonious architecture would escape detection by state-space analyses, absent a clear hypothesis.
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关键词
neural computations,direct observation,decision
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