Evidence accumulation occurs locally in the parietal cortex.

ABSTRACT: Decision making often entails evidence accumulation, a process that is represented by neural activities in a network of multiple brain areas. Yet, it has not been identified where exactly the accumulation originates. We reason that a candidate brain area should both represent evidence accumulation and information that is used to compute evidence. Therefore, we designed a two-stage probabilistic reasoning task in which the evidence for accumulation had to be first determined from sensory signals orthogonal to decisions. With a linear encoding model, we decomposed the responses of posterior parietal neurons to each stimulus into an early and a late component that represented two dissociable stages of decision making. The former reflected the transformation from sensory inputs to accumulable

SUBMITTER: Zhang Z 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9339004 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature