A Recurrent Network Mechanism of Time Integration in Perceptual Decisions

By KongFatt Wong-Lin, Xiao-Jing Wang. Journal of Neuroscience, 2006

1,055 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recent physiological studies using behaving monkeys revealed that, in a two-alternative forced-choice visual motion discrimination task, reaction time was correlated with ramping of spike activity of lateral intraparietal cortical neurons. The ramping activity appears to reflect temporal accumulation, on a timescale of hundreds of milliseconds, of sensory evidence before a decision is reached. To elucidate the cellular and circuit basis of such integration times, we developed and investigated a simplified two-variable version of a biophysically realistic cortical network model of decision making. In this model, slow time integration can be achieved robustly if excitatory reverberation is primarily mediated by NMDA receptors; our model with only fast AMPA receptors at recurrent synapses produces decision times that are not comparable with experimental observations. Moreover, we found two distinct modes of network behavior, in which decision computation by winner-take-all competition is instantiated with or without attractor states for working memory. Decision process is closely linked to the local dynamics, in the “decision space” of the system, in the vicinity of an unstable saddle steady state that separates the basins of attraction for the two alternative choices. This picture provides a rigorous and quantitative explanation for the dependence of performance and response time on the degree of task difficulty, and the reason for which reaction times are longer in error trials than in correct trials as observed in the monkey experiment. Our reduced two-variable neural model offers a simple yet biophysically plausible framework for studying perceptual decision making in general.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3cacf7985827c0f17457f7c93ceba9855910c3bd

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Citations in the corpus

NMDA Receptor Hypofunction Produces Opposite Effects on Prefrontal Cortex Interneurons and Pyramidal Neurons (2007, background): “excitatory reverberation and various network models that incorporate NMDA receptors in maintaining integrator circuits or temporal accumulation of spike activity that correlate with behavioral events (Koulakov et al., 2002; Wong and Wange, 2006).”
The Diffusion Decision Model: Theory and Data for Two-Choice Decision Tasks (2008, methodology): “Specifically, Wong and Wang (2006) developed a spiking neuron model within a dynamical systems framework for perceptual decisions of the kind presented in experiments 1 to 3 above.”
Symbols and quantities in parietal cortex: elements of a mathematical theory of number representation and manipulation (2007, background): “All of these data have been captured in detail by the above-described neuronal models (Mazurek et al., 2003; see also Smith and Ratcliff, 2004; Wong and Wang, 2006; Lo and Wang, 2006).”
Transient Cognitive Dynamics, Metastability, and Decision Making (2008, background): “These requirements are fundamentally contradictory, and current approaches [47–50] are not sufficient to explain the use of sequential activity for DM.”
Training Excitatory-Inhibitory Recurrent Neural Networks for Cognitive Tasks: A Simple and Flexible Framework (2016, background): “In the case of the network with separate excitatory and inhibitory populations (Fig 3B), units with different d ′ interact primarily through inhibitory units [67].”
Perceptual decision making in less than 30 milliseconds (2010, positive): “Indeed, the most detailed network models implementing such accumulation processes (Wang, 2002; Wong and Wang, 2006; Furman and Wang, 2008; Beck et al., 2008) replicate data from area LIP, an oculomotor area.”
Attractor and integrator networks in the brain (2021, background): “[68] Kong-Fatt Wong and Xiao-Jing Wang.”
Functional connectivity dynamics: Modeling the switching behavior of the resting state (2015, methodology): “…interpretations, re ﬂ ecting the possibility of sustained local activity such as in working memory (Miller et al., 2003) or decision making (Wong and Wang, 2006) — we emphasized non-linearity through a small parameter change and created dynamical attractors without any trivial relationship…”
Decision making in recurrent neuronal circuits. (2008, methodology): “Thus, the network displays transient dynamics of ramping activity on a timescale of up to 1 s, and this ability critically depends on the NMDA receptors (Wang, 2002; Wong and Wang, 2006).”
Hierarchical Heterogeneity across Human Cortex Shapes Large-Scale Neural Dynamics (2018, neutral): “where σ is the standard deviation of the input noise taken from a random Gaussian process νi (Wong and Wang, 2006; Deco et al., 2014b).”
Resting-State Functional Connectivity Emerges from Structurally and Dynamically Shaped Slow Linear Fluctuations (2013, methodology): “Here, we followed the reduction of Wong and Wang (2006) and used their proposed simplified version, which is obtained by neglecting the effect of AMPA receptors.”
The Neurobiology of Decision: Consensus and Controversy (2009, neutral): “Wang and colleagues (Lo and Wang, 2006; Wang, 2008; Wong and Wang, 2006) have recently shown that a single collicular or parietal circuit can be designed that performs both winner-take-all and thresholding operations in a stochastic fashion that depends on the inhibitory tone of the network (Figure ”