The Encoding of Decision Difficulty and Movement Time in the Primate Premotor Cortex

The Encoding of Decision Difficulty and Movement Time in the Primate Premotor Cortex

Estimating the difficulty of a decision is a fundamental process to elaborate complex and adaptive behaviour. In this paper, we show that the movement time of behaving monkeys performing a decision-making task is correlated with decision difficulty and that the activity of a population of neurons in...

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Main Authors: Martinez-Garcia, Marina, Insabato, Andrea, Pannunzi, Mario, Pardo-Vazquez, Jose L., Acuña, Carlos, Deco, Gustavo
Format: Online
Language:English
Published: Public Library of Science 2015
Online Access:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4640568/
id pubmed-4640568
recordtype oai_dc
spelling pubmed-46405682015-11-13 The Encoding of Decision Difficulty and Movement Time in the Primate Premotor Cortex Martinez-Garcia, Marina Insabato, Andrea Pannunzi, Mario Pardo-Vazquez, Jose L. Acuña, Carlos Deco, Gustavo Research Article Estimating the difficulty of a decision is a fundamental process to elaborate complex and adaptive behaviour. In this paper, we show that the movement time of behaving monkeys performing a decision-making task is correlated with decision difficulty and that the activity of a population of neurons in ventral Premotor cortex correlates with the movement time. Moreover, we found another population of neurons that encodes the discriminability of the stimulus, thereby supplying another source of information about the difficulty of the decision. The activity of neurons encoding the difficulty can be produced by very different computations. Therefore, we show that decision difficulty can be encoded through three different mechanisms: 1. Switch time coding, 2. rate coding and 3. binary coding. This rich representation reflects the basis of different functional aspects of difficulty in the making of a decision and the possible role of difficulty estimation in complex decision scenarios. Public Library of Science 2015-11-10 /pmc/articles/PMC4640568/ /pubmed/26556807 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1004502 Text en © 2015 Martinez-Garcia et al http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are properly credited.
repository_type Open Access Journal
institution_category Foreign Institution
institution US National Center for Biotechnology Information
building NCBI PubMed
collection Online Access
language English
format Online
author Martinez-Garcia, Marina
Insabato, Andrea
Pannunzi, Mario
Pardo-Vazquez, Jose L.
Acuña, Carlos
Deco, Gustavo
spellingShingle Martinez-Garcia, Marina
Insabato, Andrea
Pannunzi, Mario
Pardo-Vazquez, Jose L.
Acuña, Carlos
Deco, Gustavo
The Encoding of Decision Difficulty and Movement Time in the Primate Premotor Cortex
author_facet Martinez-Garcia, Marina
Insabato, Andrea
Pannunzi, Mario
Pardo-Vazquez, Jose L.
Acuña, Carlos
Deco, Gustavo
author_sort Martinez-Garcia, Marina
title The Encoding of Decision Difficulty and Movement Time in the Primate Premotor Cortex
title_short The Encoding of Decision Difficulty and Movement Time in the Primate Premotor Cortex
title_full The Encoding of Decision Difficulty and Movement Time in the Primate Premotor Cortex
title_fullStr The Encoding of Decision Difficulty and Movement Time in the Primate Premotor Cortex
title_full_unstemmed The Encoding of Decision Difficulty and Movement Time in the Primate Premotor Cortex
title_sort encoding of decision difficulty and movement time in the primate premotor cortex
description Estimating the difficulty of a decision is a fundamental process to elaborate complex and adaptive behaviour. In this paper, we show that the movement time of behaving monkeys performing a decision-making task is correlated with decision difficulty and that the activity of a population of neurons in ventral Premotor cortex correlates with the movement time. Moreover, we found another population of neurons that encodes the discriminability of the stimulus, thereby supplying another source of information about the difficulty of the decision. The activity of neurons encoding the difficulty can be produced by very different computations. Therefore, we show that decision difficulty can be encoded through three different mechanisms: 1. Switch time coding, 2. rate coding and 3. binary coding. This rich representation reflects the basis of different functional aspects of difficulty in the making of a decision and the possible role of difficulty estimation in complex decision scenarios.
publisher Public Library of Science
publishDate 2015
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4640568/
_version_ 1613499672477827072

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