Lateralized readiness potentials reveal properties of a neural mechanism for implementing a decision threshold.

ABSTRACT: Many perceptual decision making models posit that participants accumulate noisy evidence over time to improve the accuracy of their decisions, and that in free response tasks, participants respond when the accumulated evidence reaches a decision threshold. Research on the neural correlates of these models' components focuses primarily on evidence accumulation. Far less attention has been paid to the neural correlates of decision thresholds, reflecting the final commitment to a decision. Inspired by a model of bistable neural activity that implements a decision threshold, we reinterpret human lateralized readiness potentials (LRPs) as reflecting the crossing of a decision threshold. Interestingly, this threshold crossing preserves signatures of a drift-diffusion process of evidence accumula

SUBMITTER: van Vugt MK 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3953213 | biostudies-literature | 2014

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature