Dynamics of multiple-choice decision making

Neuroscientists have carried out comprehensive experiments to reveal the neural mechanisms underlying the perceptual decision making that pervades daily life. These experiments have illuminated salient features of decision making, including probabilistic choice behavior, the ramping activity of decision-related neurons, and the dependence of decision time and accuracy on the difficulty of the task. Spiking network models have reproduced these features, and a two-dimensional mean field model has demonstrated that the saddle node structure underlies two-alternative decision making. Here, we reduced a spiking network model to an analytically tractable, partial integro-differential system and characterized not only multiple-choice decision behaviors but also the time course of neural activities underlying decisions, providing a mechanistic explanation for the observations noted in the experiments. First, we observed that a two-bump unstable steady state of the system is responsible for two-choice decision making, similar to the saddle node structure in the two-dimensional mean field model. However, for four-choice decision making, three types of unstable steady states collectively predominate the time course of the evolution from the initial state to the stable states. Second, the time constant of the unstable steady state can explain the fact that four-choice decision making requires a longer time than two-choice decision making. However, the quicker decision, given a stronger motion strength, cannot be explained by the time constant of the unstable steady state. Rather, the decision time can be attributed to the projection coefficient of the difference between the initial state and the unstable steady state on the eigenvector corresponding to the largest positive eigenvalue.