PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Tomoki Kurikawa
AU  - Takashi Handa
AU  - Tomoki Fukai
TI  - Individual differences in perceptual decision making reflect neural variability in medial frontal cortex
AID  - 10.1101/139493
DP  - 2017 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 139493
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/05/18/139493.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/05/18/139493.full
AB  - Decision making obeys common neural mechanisms, but there is considerable variability in individuals’ decision making behavior particularly under uncertainty. How individual differences arise within common decision making brain systems is not known. Here, we explored this question in the medial frontal cortex (MFC) of rats performing a sensory-guided choice task. When rats trained on familiar stimuli were exposed to unfamiliar stimuli, choice responses varied significantly across individuals. We examined how variability in MFC neural processing could mediate this individual difference and constructed a network model to replicate this. Our model suggested that susceptibility of neural trajectories is a crucial determinant of the observed choice variability. The model predicted that trial-by-trial variability of trajectories are correlated with the susceptibility, and hence also correlated with the individual difference. This prediction was confirmed by experiment. Thus, our results suggest that variability in neural dynamics in MFC networks underlies individual differences in decision making.