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Timing of readiness potentials reflect a decision-making process in the human brain

Kitty K. Lui, Michael D. Nunez, Jessica M. Cassidy, Joachim Vandekerckhove, Steven C. Cramer, Ramesh Srinivasan
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/338806
Kitty K. Lui
1Department of Cognitive Sciences, University of California, Irvine USA
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Michael D. Nunez
2Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of California, Irvine USA
1Department of Cognitive Sciences, University of California, Irvine USA
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Jessica M. Cassidy
3Department of Neurology, University of California, Irvine USA
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Joachim Vandekerckhove
1Department of Cognitive Sciences, University of California, Irvine USA
4Department of Statistics, University of California, Irvine USA
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Steven C. Cramer
3Department of Neurology, University of California, Irvine USA
5Department of Anatomy & Neurobiology, University of California, Irvine USA
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Ramesh Srinivasan
1Department of Cognitive Sciences, University of California, Irvine USA
2Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of California, Irvine USA
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Abstract

Perceptual decision making has several underlying components including stimulus encoding, perceptual categorization, response selection, and response execution. Evidence accumulation is believed to be the underlying mechanism of decision-making and plays a decisive role in determining response time. Previous studies in animals and humans have shown parietal cortex activity that exhibits characteristics of evidence accumulation in tasks requiring difficult perceptual categorization to reach a decision. In this study, we made use of a task where the challenge for the participants is to identify the stimulus and then from memory apply an abstract rule to select one of two possible actions. The task was designed so that stimulus identification was easy but response selection required cognitive computations and working memory. In simultaneous EEG recordings, we find a one-to-one relationship between the duration of the readiness potential observed prior to the response over motor areas, and decision-making time estimated by a drift-diffusion model of the response time distribution. This close relationship implies that the readiness potential reflects an evidence accumulation process for response selection, and supports the notion that evidence accumulation is a general neural implementation of decision-making. The evidence accumulation process that captures variability in decision-making time will depend on the location of the bottleneck in information processing.

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The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.
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Posted June 04, 2018.
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Timing of readiness potentials reflect a decision-making process in the human brain
Kitty K. Lui, Michael D. Nunez, Jessica M. Cassidy, Joachim Vandekerckhove, Steven C. Cramer, Ramesh Srinivasan
bioRxiv 338806; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/338806
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Timing of readiness potentials reflect a decision-making process in the human brain
Kitty K. Lui, Michael D. Nunez, Jessica M. Cassidy, Joachim Vandekerckhove, Steven C. Cramer, Ramesh Srinivasan
bioRxiv 338806; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/338806

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