Human and monkey perceptual decisions in changing conditions

old_uid6541
titleHuman and monkey perceptual decisions in changing conditions
start_date2009/03/19
schedule16h
onlineno
summaryOver the past two decades significant progresses have been made toward understanding the neural basis of primate decision-making. Although this high-order cognitive process can be extremely complex, most of decision-making studies and models have largely focused on perceptual, binary choices. It has been suggested from these studies that simple decisions are made through a process of “bounded integration”, in which neurons integrate sensory evidence until a threshold is reached. Especially, cortical and sub-cortical areas devoted to saccade planning and execution (LIP, FEF, SC) seem to integer the momentary sensory evidence during oculomotor decisions. However, nearly all of the results supporting this theory have been obtained in tasks where sensory evidence was /constant/ during the course of each trial. In such specific situation, behavioral and neural data are also compatible with a model in which there is no integration of sensory evidence, but instead a multiplication of current evidence by a growing “urgency” signal. In a recent study, Cisek et al. (/submitted/) have presented human subjects with a task (“tokens task”) in which /evidence changed over time/. Results are more consistent with the “urgency-gating” model than with “integrator” ones. Moreover, preliminary data on humans tend to show that such mechanism is not task-specific, as we found similar results in another task (“dots task”) in which stimuli providing subject’s sensory evidence were sensitively different. Finally, in order to probe the neural basis of decisions in /changing conditions/, we trained a monkey to perform the “tokens task”. Our first hypothesis is that cortical areas devoted to planning and execution of arm movements (e.g. PMd) are recruited when a decision has to be made with the arm. Then, according to our behavioral data, we make the prediction that the product of the momentary information and a growing signal related to elapsed time (“urgency-gating model”) is used and compared to a threshold to form decisions.
oncancelSéance initialement prévue le 11 décembre 2008
responsiblesFarnè, Béranger, Soulier