Task-evoked pupil responses reflect internal belief states.

ABSTRACT: Perceptual decisions about the state of the environment are often made in the face of uncertain evidence. Internal uncertainty signals are considered important regulators of learning and decision-making. A growing body of work has implicated the brain's arousal systems in uncertainty signaling. Here, we found that two specific computational variables, postulated by recent theoretical work, evoke boosts of arousal at different times during a perceptual decision: decision confidence (the observer's internally estimated probability that a choice was correct given the evidence) before feedback, and prediction errors (deviations from expected reward) after feedback. We monitored pupil diameter, a peripheral marker of central arousal state, while subjects performed a challenging perceptual choic

SUBMITTER: Colizoli O 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6135755 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature