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A somatosensory-to-motor cascade of cortical areas engaged in perceptual decision making during tactile pattern discrimination.

ABSTRACT: The processes underlying perceptual decision making are diverse and typically engage a distributed network of brain areas. It is a particular challenge to establish a sensory-to-motor functional hierarchy in such networks. This is because single-cell recordings mainly study the nodes of decision networks in isolation but seldom simultaneously. Moreover, imaging methods, which allow simultaneously accessing information from overall networks, typically suffer from either the temporal or the spatial resolution necessary to establish a detailed functional hierarchy in terms of a sequential recruitment of areas during a decision process. Here we report a novel analytical approach to work around these latter limitations: using temporal differences in human fMRI activation profiles during a tactile discrimination task with immediate versus experimentally delayed behavioral responses, we could derive a linear functional gradient across task-related brain areas in terms of their relative dependence on sensory input versus motor output. The gradient was established by comparing peak latencies of activation between the two response conditions. The resulting time differences described a continuum that ranged from zero time difference, indicative for areas that process information related to the sensory input and, thus, are invariant to the response delay instruction, to time differences corresponding to the delayed response onset, thus indicating motor-related processing. Taken together with our previous findings (Li Hegner et al. []: Hum Brain Mapp 36:3339-3350), our results suggest that the anterior insula reflects the ultimate perceptual stage within the uncovered sensory-to-motor gradient, likely translating sensory information into a categorical abstract (non-motor) decision. Hum Brain Mapp 38:1172-1181, 2017. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

SUBMITTER: Hegner YL

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6867017 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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A somatosensory-to-motor cascade of cortical areas engaged in perceptual decision making during tactile pattern discrimination.

Hegner Yiwen Li YL Lindner Axel A Braun Christoph C

Human brain mapping 20161021 3

The processes underlying perceptual decision making are diverse and typically engage a distributed network of brain areas. It is a particular challenge to establish a sensory-to-motor functional hierarchy in such networks. This is because single-cell recordings mainly study the nodes of decision networks in isolation but seldom simultaneously. Moreover, imaging methods, which allow simultaneously accessing information from overall networks, typically suffer from either the temporal or the spatia ...[more]

PMID: 27767240

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Project description:Probability matching is a classic theory of decision making that was first developed in models of cognition. Posterior probability matching, a variant in which observers match their response probabilities to the posterior probability of each response being correct, is being used increasingly often in models of perception. However, little is known about whether posterior probability matching is consistent with the vast literature on vision and hearing that has developed within signal detection theory. Here we test posterior probability matching models using two tools from detection theory. First, we examine the models' performance in a two-pass experiment, where each block of trials is presented twice, and we measure the proportion of times that the model gives the same response twice to repeated stimuli. We show that at low performance levels, posterior probability matching models give highly inconsistent responses across repeated presentations of identical trials. We find that practised human observers are more consistent across repeated trials than these models predict, and we find some evidence that less practised observers more consistent as well. Second, we compare the performance of posterior probability matching models on a discrimination task to the performance of a theoretical ideal observer that achieves the best possible performance. We find that posterior probability matching is very inefficient at low-to-moderate performance levels, and that human observers can be more efficient than is ever possible according to posterior probability matching models. These findings support classic signal detection models, and rule out a broad class of posterior probability matching models for expert performance on perceptual tasks that range in complexity from contrast discrimination to symmetry detection. However, our findings leave open the possibility that inexperienced observers may show posterior probability matching behaviour, and our methods provide new tools for testing for such a strategy.

Dataset Information

A somatosensory-to-motor cascade of cortical areas engaged in perceptual decision making during tactile pattern discrimination.

Publications

A somatosensory-to-motor cascade of cortical areas engaged in perceptual decision making during tactile pattern discrimination.

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