scholarly journals Mice can learn a stimulus-invariant orientation discrimination task

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dmitry R Lyamzin ◽  
Ryo Aoki ◽  
Mohammad Abdolrahmani ◽  
Andrea Benucci
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Discrimination Task ◽  
Choice Model ◽  
Sensory Information ◽  
Orientation Discrimination ◽  
Decision Variable ◽  
Cognitive State ◽  
Specific Information ◽  
Behavioral Strategies ◽  
Perceptual Decision Making

SummaryUnderstanding how the brain computes choice from sensory information is a central question of perceptual decision-making. Relevant behavioral tasks condition choice on abstract or invariant properties of the stimuli, thus decoupling stimulus-specific information from the decision variable. Among visual tasks, orientation discrimination is a gold standard; however, it is not clear if a mouse – a recently popular animal model in visual decision-making research – can learn an invariant orientation discrimination task and what choice strategies it would use.Here we show that mice can solve a discrimination task where choices are decoupled from the orientation of individual stimuli, depending instead on a measure of relative orientation. Mice learned this task, reaching an upper bound for discrimination acuity of 6 degrees and relying on decisionmaking strategies that balanced cognitive resources with history-dependent biases.We analyzed behavioral data from n=40 animals with the help of a novel probabilistic choice model that we used to interpret individual biases and behavioral strategies. The model explained variation in performance with task difficulty and identified unreported dimensions of variation associated with the circularity of the stimulus space. Furthermore, it showed a larger effect of history biases on animals’ choices during periods of lower engagement.Our results demonstrate that mice can learn invariant perceptual representations by combining decision-relevant stimulus information decoupled from low-level visual features, with the computation of the decision variable dependent on the cognitive state.

scholarly journals Probabilistic discrimination of relative stimulus features in mice

2021 ◽  
Vol 118 (30) ◽  
pp. e2103952118
Author(s):  
Dmitry R. Lyamzin ◽  
Ryo Aoki ◽  
Mohammad Abdolrahmani ◽  
Andrea Benucci
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Discrimination Task ◽  
Choice Model ◽  
Relevant Information ◽  
Orientation Discrimination ◽  
Specific Information ◽  
Common Belief ◽  
Behavioral Strategies ◽  
Perceptual Decision Making ◽  
Perceptual Decision

During perceptual decision-making, the brain encodes the upcoming decision and the stimulus information in a mixed representation. Paradigms suitable for studying decision computations in isolation rely on stimulus comparisons, with choices depending on relative rather than absolute properties of the stimuli. The adoption of tasks requiring relative perceptual judgments in mice would be advantageous in view of the powerful tools available for the dissection of brain circuits. However, whether and how mice can perform a relative visual discrimination task has not yet been fully established. Here, we show that mice can solve a complex orientation discrimination task in which the choices are decoupled from the orientation of individual stimuli. Moreover, we demonstrate a typical discrimination acuity of 9°, challenging the common belief that mice are poor visual discriminators. We reached these conclusions by introducing a probabilistic choice model that explained behavioral strategies in 40 mice and demonstrated that the circularity of the stimulus space is an additional source of choice variability for trials with fixed difficulty. Furthermore, history biases in the model changed with task engagement, demonstrating behavioral sensitivity to the availability of cognitive resources. In conclusion, our results reveal that mice adopt a diverse set of strategies in a task that decouples decision-relevant information from stimulus-specific information, thus demonstrating their usefulness as an animal model for studying neural representations of relative categories in perceptual decision-making research.

scholarly journals Re-thinking the fixed-criterion model of perceptual decision-making

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Laura Lee ◽  
Rachel N. Denison ◽  
Wei Ji Ma
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Probabilistic Reasoning ◽  
Sensory Information ◽  
Feature Space ◽  
Decision Criterion ◽  
Decision Variable ◽  
Perceptual Decision Making ◽  
Perceptual Decision ◽  
Response Variance ◽  
Sensory Uncertainty

Perceptual decision-making is often conceptualized as the process of comparing an internal decision variable to a categorical boundary, or criterion. How the mind sets such a criterion has been studied from at least two perspectives. First, researchers interested in consciousness have proposed that criterion-crossing determines whether a stimulus is consciously perceived. Second, researchers interested in decision-making have studied how the criterion depends on a range of stimulus and task variables. Both communities have considered the question of how the criterion behaves when sensory information is weak or uncertain. Interestingly, however, they have arrived at different conclusions. Consciousness researchers investigating a phenomenon called "subjective inflation" – a form of metacognitive mismatch in which observers overestimate the quality of their sensory representations in the periphery or at an unattended location – have proposed that the criterion governing subjective visibility is fixed. That is, it does not adjust to changes in sensory uncertainty. Decision-making researchers, on the other hand, have concluded that the criterion does adjust to account for sensory uncertainty, including under inattention. Here, we mathematically demonstrate that previous empirical findings supporting subjective inflation are consistent with either a fixed or a flexible decision criterion. We further show that specific experimental task requirements are necessary to make inferences about the flexibility of the criterion: 1) a clear mapping from decision variable space to stimulus feature space, and 2) a task incentive for observers to adjust their decision criterion as response variance increases. We conclude that the fixed-criterion model of subjective inflation requires re-thinking in light of new evidence from the probabilistic reasoning literature that decision criteria flexibly adjust according to response variance.

scholarly journals Sensor-Level Wavelet Analysis Reveals EEG Biomarkers of Perceptual Decision-Making

Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (7) ◽  
pp. 2461
Author(s):  
Alexander Kuc ◽  
Vadim V. Grubov ◽  
Vladimir A. Maksimenko ◽  
Natalia Shusharina ◽  
Alexander N. Pisarchik ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Sensory Information ◽  
Stimulus Onset ◽  
Perceptual Process ◽  
Perceptual Decision Making ◽  
Beta Band ◽  
Perceptual Decision ◽  
Time Frequency ◽  
Band Power ◽  
Sensory Features

Perceptual decision-making requires transforming sensory information into decisions. An ambiguity of sensory input affects perceptual decisions inducing specific time-frequency patterns on EEG (electroencephalogram) signals. This paper uses a wavelet-based method to analyze how ambiguity affects EEG features during a perceptual decision-making task. We observe that parietal and temporal beta-band wavelet power monotonically increases throughout the perceptual process. Ambiguity induces high frontal beta-band power at 0.3–0.6 s post-stimulus onset. It may reflect the increasing reliance on the top-down mechanisms to facilitate accumulating decision-relevant sensory features. Finally, this study analyzes the perceptual process using mixed within-trial and within-subject design. First, we found significant percept-related changes in each subject and then test their significance at the group level. Thus, observed beta-band biomarkers are pronounced in single EEG trials and may serve as control commands for brain-computer interface (BCI).

scholarly journals Effects of expected task difficulty on metacognitive confidence and multitasking

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maxine Tamara Sherman ◽  
Anil Seth
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Self Efficacy ◽  
Secondary Task ◽  
Task Difficulty ◽  
Discrimination Task ◽  
Prior Probability ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Perceptual Discrimination ◽  
Perceptual Decision Making ◽  
Decision Confidence

In daily life, repeated experiences with a task (e.g. driving) will generally result in the development of a belief about one’s ability (“I am a good driver”). Here we ask how such beliefs, termed self-efficacy, interact with metacognitive confidence judgements. Across three pre-registered experiments, participants performed a perceptual discrimination task and reported their decision confidence. We induced contextual beliefs about performance (our operationalisation of self-efficacy) by manipulating the prior probability of an easy or hard trial occurring in each block. In Experiment 1 easy and hard trials generated the same levels of performance (a “subjective difficulty” manipulation), whereas in Experiments 2 and 3 performance differed across difficulty conditions (an “objective difficulty” manipulation). Results showed that context (self-efficacy) and difficulty interacted multiplicatively, consistent with the notion that confidence judgements combine decision evidence with a prior (contextual) belief on being correct. This occurred despite context having no corresponding effect on performance. We reasoned that performing tasks in easy contexts may reduce cognitive “load”, and tested this, in Experiment 3, by instructing participants to perform two tasks concurrently. Consistent with a reduction in load, the effects of context transferred from influencing confidence on our primary task to improving performance on the secondary task. Taken together, these studies reveal that contextual beliefs about performance facilitate multitasking, potentially by reducing the load of tasks believed to be easy, and they extend psychophysical investigations of perceptual decision-making by incorporating ‘higher-order’ beliefs about difficulty context, corresponding to intuitive notions of self-efficacy.

scholarly journals Strategy-dependent effects of working-memory limitations on human perceptual decision-making

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kyra Schapiro ◽  
Kresimir Josic ◽  
Zachary Kilpatrick ◽  
Joshua I Gold
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Working Memory ◽  
Decision Variable ◽  
Perceptual Decision Making ◽  
Perceptual Decision ◽  
Human Psychophysics ◽  
Decision Variables ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Brain ◽  
Over Time

Deliberative decisions based on an accumulation of evidence over time depend on working memory, and working memory has limitations, but how these limitations affect deliberative decision-making is not understood. We used human psychophysics to assess the impact of working-memory limitations on the fidelity of a continuous decision variable. Participants decided the average location of multiple visual targets. This computed, continuous decision variable degraded with time and capacity in a manner that depended critically on the strategy used to form the decision variable. This dependence reflected whether the decision variable was computed either: 1) immediately upon observing the evidence, and thus stored as a single value in memory; or 2) at the time of the report, and thus stored as multiple values in memory. These results provide important constraints on how the brain computes and maintains temporally dynamic decision variables.

scholarly journals The effect of context on sensory accumulation involved in decision-making

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 23-24
Author(s):  
Léa Caya-Bissonnette
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Sensory Information ◽  
Field Potential ◽  
Stimulus Presentation ◽  
Decision Processes ◽  
Decision Variable ◽  
Lateral Intraparietal Cortex ◽  
Underlying Processes ◽  
Do So

The underlying processes allowing for decision-making has been a question of interest for many neuroscientists. The lateral intraparietal cortex, or LIP, was shown to accumulate context and sensory information to compute a decision variable. The following review will present the work of Kumano, Suda and Uka who studied the link between context and sensory information during decision-making. To do so, a monkey was trained to associate the color of a fixating dot to one of two tasks. The tasks consisted in either indicating the motion or the depth of themajority of the dots on a screen. The local field potential of the LIP neurons was recorded, and the researchers found a role of context during the stimulus presentation in regards to decision formation. The results have important implication for mental disorders involving malfunction in decision processes.

scholarly journals Motor effort and adaptive sampling in perceptual decision-making

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tianyao Zhu
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Adaptive Sampling ◽  
Network Models ◽  
Sampling Bias ◽  
Switching Behavior ◽  
Decision Variable ◽  
Perceptual Decision Making ◽  
Attention Switching ◽  
Experimental Conditions ◽  
Perceptual Decision

AbstractPeople usually switch their attention between the options when trying to make a decision. In our experiments, we bound motor effort to such switching behavior during a two-alternative perceptual decision-making task and recorded the sampling patterns by computer mouse cursor tracking. We found that the time and motor cost to make the decision positively correlated with the number of switches between the stimuli and increased with the difficulty of the task. Specifically, the first and last sampled items were chosen in an attempt to minimize the overall motor effort during the task and were manipulable by biasing the relevant motor cost. Moreover, we observed the last-sampling bias that the last sampled item was more likely to be chosen by the subjects. We listed all possible Bayesian Network models for different hypotheses regarding the causal relationship behind the last-sampling bias, and only the model assuming bidirectional dependency between attention and decision successfully predicted the empirical results. Meanwhile, denying that the current decision variable can feedback into the attention switching patterns during sampling, the conventional attentional drift-diffusion model (aDDM) was inadequate to explain the size of the last-sampling bias in our experimental conditions. We concluded that the sampling behavior during perceptual decision-making actively adapted to the motor effort in the specific task settings, as well as the temporary decision.

scholarly journals Evidence against perfect integration of sensory information during perceptual decision making

2016 ◽  
Vol 115 (2) ◽  
pp. 915-930 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew A. Carland ◽  
Encarni Marcos ◽  
David Thura ◽  
Paul Cisek
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Neural Activity ◽  
Temporal Integration ◽  
Sensory Information ◽  
Reaction Times ◽  
Perceptual Decision Making ◽  
Pass Filter ◽  
Low Pass Filter ◽  
Perceptual Decision ◽  
Low Pass

Perceptual decision making is often modeled as perfect integration of sequential sensory samples until the accumulated total reaches a fixed decision bound. In that view, the buildup of neural activity during perceptual decision making is attributed to temporal integration. However, an alternative explanation is that sensory estimates are computed quickly with a low-pass filter and combined with a growing signal reflecting the urgency to respond and it is the latter that is primarily responsible for neural activity buildup. These models are difficult to distinguish empirically because they make similar predictions for tasks in which sensory information is constant within a trial, as in most previous studies. Here we presented subjects with a variant of the classic constant-coherence motion discrimination (CMD) task in which we inserted brief motion pulses. We examined the effect of these pulses on reaction times (RTs) in two conditions: 1) when the CMD trials were blocked and subjects responded quickly and 2) when the same CMD trials were interleaved among trials of a variable-motion coherence task that motivated slower decisions. In the blocked condition, early pulses had a strong effect on RTs but late pulses did not, consistent with both models. However, when subjects slowed their decision policy in the interleaved condition, later pulses now became effective while early pulses lost their efficacy. This last result contradicts models based on perfect integration of sensory evidence and implies that motion signals are processed with a strong leak, equivalent to a low-pass filter with a short time constant.

scholarly journals Neural Correlates of Evidence and Urgency During Human Perceptual Decision-Making in Dynamically Changing Conditions

2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (10) ◽  
pp. 5471-5483
Author(s):  
Y Yau ◽  
M Dadar ◽  
M Taylor ◽  
Y Zeighami ◽  
L K Fellows ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Computational Models ◽  
Sensory Information ◽  
Neural Correlates ◽  
Primate Research ◽  
Perceptual Decision Making ◽  
Emotional Information ◽  
Perceptual Decision ◽  
The Face ◽  
The Brain

Abstract Current models of decision-making assume that the brain gradually accumulates evidence and drifts toward a threshold that, once crossed, results in a choice selection. These models have been especially successful in primate research; however, transposing them to human fMRI paradigms has proved it to be challenging. Here, we exploit the face-selective visual system and test whether decoded emotional facial features from multivariate fMRI signals during a dynamic perceptual decision-making task are related to the parameters of computational models of decision-making. We show that trial-by-trial variations in the pattern of neural activity in the fusiform gyrus reflect facial emotional information and modulate drift rates during deliberation. We also observed an inverse-urgency signal based in the caudate nucleus that was independent of sensory information but appeared to slow decisions, particularly when information in the task was ambiguous. Taken together, our results characterize how decision parameters from a computational model (i.e., drift rate and urgency signal) are involved in perceptual decision-making and reflected in the activity of the human brain.

From anticipation to action, the role of dopamine in perceptual decision making: an fMRI-tyrosine depletion study

2012 ◽  
Vol 108 (2) ◽  
pp. 501-512 ◽  
Author(s):  
Atsuko Nagano-Saito ◽  
Paul Cisek ◽  
Andrea S. Perna ◽  
Fatemeh Z. Shirdel ◽  
Chawki Benkelfat ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Functional Mri ◽  
Contextual Information ◽  
Sensory Information ◽  
Amino Acid Mixture ◽  
Neuron Activity ◽  
Acid Mixture ◽  
Decision Threshold ◽  
Perceptual Decision Making ◽  
Dopamine Transmission

During simple sensorimotor decision making, neurons in the parietal cortex extract evidence from sensory information provided by visual areas until a decision is reached. Contextual information can bias parietal activity during the task and change the decision-making parameters. One type of contextual information is the availability of reward for correct decisions. We tested the hypothesis that the frontal lobes and basal ganglia use contextual information to bias decision making to maximize reward. Human volunteers underwent functional MRI while making decisions about the motion of dots on a computer monitor. On rewarded trials, subjects responded more slowly by increasing the threshold to decision. Rewarded trials were associated with activation in the ventral striatum and prefrontal cortex in the period preceding coherent dot motion, and the degree of activation predicted the increased decision threshold. Decreasing dopamine transmission, using a tyrosine-depleting amino acid mixture, abolished the reward-related corticostriatal activation and eliminated the correlation between striatal activity and decision threshold. These observations provide direct evidence that some reward-related functional MRI signals in the striatum are the result of dopamine neuron activity and demonstrate that mesolimbic dopamine transmission can influence perceptual and decision-making neural processes engaged to maximize reward harvest.

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