Sensory-motor mechanisms in human parietal cortex underlie arbitrary visual decisions

By Annalisa Tosoni, Gaspare Galati, Gian Luca Romani, Maurizio Corbetta. 2008

241 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience

Citations in the corpus

• Orthogonal representations for robust context-dependent task performance in brains and neural networks (2022, neutral): “Univariate tests replicated standard findings, including the heightened BOLD signal in PFC on task switch relative to stay trials (Figures S3A and S3B), the correlation between BOLD signal and decision certainty in posterior parietal (Tosoni et al., 2008) and medial orbitofrontal cortex (Basten et a”
• Self-Evaluation of Decision-Making: A General Bayesian Framework for Metacognitive Computation (2017, unknown): “…to this problem would be to maintain global representations of sensory evidence in a response-independent frame of reference (Heekeren, Marrett, Ruff, Bandettini, & Un-gerleider, 2006; Ho, Brown, & Serences, 2009; O’Connell, Dock-ree, & Kelly, 2012; Tosoni, Galati, Romani, & Corbetta, 2008).”
• Default network activity, coupled with the frontoparietal control network, supports goal-directed cognition (2010, unknown): “…by, uninvolved in, or even antithetical to, goal-directed behavior (c.f. CarhartHarris and Friston, 2010; Kelly et al., 2008; Park et al., 2010; Shipman and Astur, 2008; Sigman et al., 2005; Sonuga-Barke and Castellanos, 2007; Thomason et al., 2008; Tosoni et al., 2008; see Supplemental Material).”