Abstract
The neural mechanism underlying simple perceptual decision-making in monkeys has been recently conceptualized as an integrative process in which sensory evidence supporting different response options accumulates gradually over time. For example, intraparietal neurons accumulate motion information in favor of a specific oculomotor choice over time. It is unclear, however, whether this mechanism generalizes to more complex decisions that are based on arbitrary stimulus-response associations. In a task requiring arbitrary association of visual stimuli (faces or places) with different actions (eye or hand-pointing movements), we found that activity of effector-specific regions in human posterior parietal cortex reflected the 'strength' of the sensory evidence in favor of the preferred response. These regions did not respond to sensory stimuli per se but integrated sensory evidence toward the decision outcome. We conclude that even arbitrary decisions can be mediated by sensory-motor mechanisms that are completely triggered by contextual stimulus-response associations.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to E. Lombardi for her assistance in data collection. We also thank C. Lewis and C. Sestieri for technical support on data analysis, and A. Snyder, M. McAvoy and E. Akbudak for software and hardware development. This work was supported by the EU FP6-MEXC-CT-2004-006783 project (Investigations in Brain Sciences Education Network), US National Institute of Mental Health grant R01MH71920-06 and US National Institutes of Health grant NS48013 to M.C., by Italian Ministry of University and Research grant PRIN 2005119851_004 to G.G., and by the 3rd Ph.D. Internationalization Program of the Italian Ministry of University and Research.
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A.T., G.G. and M.C. were involved in experimental design. A.T. was responsible for data acquisition and data analysis, and A.T., G.G., G.L.R. and M.C. were involved in data interpretation and writing the manuscript.
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Tosoni, A., Galati, G., Romani, G. et al. Sensory-motor mechanisms in human parietal cortex underlie arbitrary visual decisions. Nat Neurosci 11, 1446–1453 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.2221
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.2221
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