Abstract
A large body of work has identified characteristic neural signatures of value-based decision-making. A core circuit has been shown to track the values of options under consideration, and the dynamics of neural activity associated with this circuit have been found to closely resemble the ramping evidence accumulation process believed to underpin goal-directed choice, most notably in the centroparietal positivity (CPP). However, recent neuroimaging studies suggest that value-based choices trigger multiple value-related neural signatures, some of which are unrelated to decision-making per se but instead reflect reflexive affective reactions to one’s options. Here, we use the temporal resolution of EEG to test whether choice-independent value signals could be dissociated from well-known temporal signatures of the choice process. We show that EEG activity during value-based choice can be decomposed into distinct spatiotemporal clusters, one stimulus-locked (associated with the affective salience of a choice set) and one response-locked (associated with the difficulty of selecting the best option). We show that neither of these clusters meet the criteria for an evidence accumulation signal. Instead, and to our surprise, we found that stimulus-locked activity can mimic an evidence accumulation process when aligned to the response (as with the CPP). In this dataset and a second one that uses a more traditional perceptual decision-making task, we show that the CPP’s apparent pattern of evidence accumulation disappears when stimulus-locked and response-locked signals are accounted for jointly. Collectively, our findings show that neural signatures of value can reflect choice-independent processes that when analyzed using standard approaches, can look deceptively like evidence accumulation.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
