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

Kitty K. Lui, View ORCID ProfileMichael D. Nunez, Jessica M. Cassidy, Joachim Vandekerckhove, Steven C. Cramer, Ramesh Srinivasan
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/338806
Kitty K. Lui
aDepartment of Cognitive Sciences, University of California, Irvine USA
bDepartment of Psychiatry and Human Behavior, University of California, Irvine USA
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Michael D. Nunez
aDepartment of Cognitive Sciences, University of California, Irvine USA
cDepartment of Biomedical Engineering, University of California, Irvine USA
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  • For correspondence: mdnunez1@uci.edu
Jessica M. Cassidy
dDepartment of Neurology, University of California, Irvine USA
eDepartment of Allied Health Sciences, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA
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Joachim Vandekerckhove
aDepartment of Cognitive Sciences, University of California, Irvine USA
fDepartment of Statistics, University of California, Irvine USA
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Steven C. Cramer
dDepartment of Neurology, University of California, Irvine USA
gDepartment of Anatomy & Neurobiology, University of California, Irvine USA
hDepartment of Neurology, University of California, Los Angeles USA
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Ramesh Srinivasan
aDepartment of Cognitive Sciences, University of California, Irvine USA
cDepartment of Biomedical Engineering, University of California, Irvine USA
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Abstract

Decision-making in two-alternative forced choice tasks has several underlying components including stimulus encoding, perceptual categorization, response selection, and response execution. Sequential sampling models of decision-making are based on an evidence accumulation process to a decision boundary. Animal and human studies have focused on perceptual categorization and provide evidence linking brain signals in parietal cortex to the evidence accumulation process. In this exploratory study, we use a task where the dominant contribution to response time is response selection and model the response time data with the drift-diffusion model. EEG measurement during the task show that the Readiness Potential (RP) recorded over motor areas has timing consistent with the evidence accumulation process. The duration of the RP predicts decision-making time, the duration of evidence accumulation, suggesting that the RP partly reflects an evidence accumulation process for response selection in the motor system. Thus, evidence accumulation may be a neural implementation of decision-making processes in both perceptual and motor systems. The contributions of perceptual categorization and response selection to evidence accumulation processes in decision-making tasks can be potentially evaluated by examining the timing of perceptual and motor EEG signals.

Competing Interest Statement

The authors have declared no competing interest.

Copyright 
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 November 02, 2020.
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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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