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Poster C141 in Poster Session C - Friday, August 9, 2024, 11:15 am – 1:15 pm, Johnson Ice Rink
This decision matters: Sorting out the factors that lead to a single choice
Mathew Diamond1 (), Iacopo Hachen1, Marlen Gironimi1, Davide Giana1, Maria Ravera1, Francesca Pulecchi1, Sebastian Reinartz1; 1SENSEx Lab, International School for Advanced Studies, Trieste, Italy
While cognitive neuroscientists have uncovered principles of perceptual decision-making by analyzing choices and neuronal firing across thousands of trials, we do not yet know the behavioral or neuronal dynamics underlying one SINGLE choice. For instance, why might a subject judge a given stimulus in category A 70% of the time and in category B 30%? Until we can work out what determines precisely this decision, right now, the mechanisms of single-choices, real-world decision-making (where the agent frequently has just one opportunity) will remain unknown. In tactile psychophysical tasks with rats and humans, we are sorting out factors that explain the variability in judgments (across trials) to the identical stimulus input. We identify four factors: (i) trial-to-trial fluctuations in sensory coding, (ii) temporal context, namely, the history of preceding stimuli and choices, (iii) attention, and (iv) bias, namely, predictions originating in beliefs about the environment’s probabilistic structure. The strategy is to bring these factors under experimental control, rather than leaving them to vary according to uninterrogated states within the subject. Psychophysics from rats and humans show that large chunks of variability are accounted for by these factors; evidence from cortical neuronal populations in rats provides some mechanistic grounding.
Keywords: psychophysics decision making tactile perception