Representation of confidence associated with a decision by neurons in the parietal cortex

By Roozbeh Kiani, Michael N. Shadlen. 2009

994 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Decisive Monkeys Decision-making is a central theme in current research in cognitive neuroscience. Behavioral protocols have provided an entry into explorations of the neural processes that underlie decision-making. Empirical studies have provided support for a diffusion model in which information accumulates over time until a threshold is reached, with noisiness in the inputs related to decision errors. Kiani and Shadlen (p. 759) developed a behavioral task to study choice certainty and identified the corresponding neuronal representations in monkeys. The monkeys were allowed to choose to opt out of an uncertain, higher reward choice in favor of a certain, lower payoff. The same neurons that encoded the information used to make a choice also encoded the extent of certainty, which in humans would be described as the degree of confidence in one's decision. Neurons in the primate parietal cortex encode information required to make a decision and also the certainty of that choice. The degree of confidence in a decision provides a graded and probabilistic assessment of expected outcome. Although neural mechanisms of perceptual decisions have been studied extensively in primates, little is known about the mechanisms underlying choice certainty. We have shown that the same neurons that represent formation of a decision encode certainty about the decision. Rhesus monkeys made decisions about the direction of moving random dots, spanning a range of difficulties. They were rewarded for correct decisions. On some trials, after viewing the stimulus, the monkeys could opt out of the direction decision for a small but certain reward. Monkeys exercised this option in a manner that revealed their degree of certainty. Neurons in parietal cortex represented formation of the direction decision and the degree of certainty underlying the decision to opt out.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience

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Citations in the corpus

Multistability and Perceptual Inference (2012, background): “ARTICLE Communicated by Nando de Freitas”
Metacognition in Psychology (2019, neutral): “The parietal cortex has been implicated for certainty in perceptual decision making (Kiani & Shadlen, 2009), and neural activity in a task-specific area, such as the supplementary eye field, has been found to be related to post-decisional wagering.”
Post-decisional accounts of biases in confidence (2016, background): “This assumption rests on a vast corpus of neurophysiological evidence in rodents [3] and monkeys [7] showing that changes in stimulus reliability (e.”
Hierarchical decision processes that operate over distinct timescales underlie choice and changes in strategy (2016, neutral): “Logit PT ,F− ðswitchÞ = β0 + β1CT−1 + β2τT−1 + β3N, [3]”
Prefrontal contributions to metacognition in perceptual decision-making (2012, background): “Previous studies of the neural substrates of decision confidence have directly manipulated perceptual decision difficulty (Kepecs et al., 2008; Kiani and Shadlen, 2009; Rolls et al., 2010).”
The neural basis of metacognitive ability (2012, background): “Recent single-neuron recording studies have begun to outline candidate mechanisms for a representation of uncertainty in the decision system [52, 53].”
Self-Evaluation of Decision-Making: A General Bayesian Framework for Metacognitive Computation (2017, background): “…models of decision confidence have focused on the role played by the decision variable—an internal subjective state that is influenced by incoming sensory evidence (Kepecs, Uchida, Zari-wala, & Mainen, 2008; Kiani & Shadlen, 2009; Merkle & Van Zandt, 2006; Ratcliff & Starns, 2009; Vickers, 1979).”
Experimental and theoretical approaches to conscious processing. (2011, background): “Furthemore, they can be adapted to nonhuman subjects (Kiani and Shadlen, 2009; Terrace and Son, 2009).”