Coupled Decision Processes Update and Maintain Saccadic Priors in a Dynamic Environment

Much of what we know about how the brain forms decisions comes from studies of saccadic eye movements. However, saccadic decisions are often studied in isolation, which limits the insights that they can provide about real-world decisions with complex interdependencies. Here, we used a serial reaction time (RT) task to show that prior expectations affect RTs via interdependent, normative decision processes that operate within and across saccades. We found that human subjects performing the task generated saccades that were governed by a rise-to-threshold decision process with a starting point that reflected expected state-dependent transition probabilities. These probabilities depended on decisions about the current state (the correct target) that, under some conditions, required the accumulation of information across saccades. Without additional feedback, this information was provided by each saccadic decision threshold, which represented the total evidence in favor of the chosen target. Therefore, the output of the within-saccade process was used, not only to generate the saccade, but also to provide input to the across-saccade process. This across-saccade process, in turn, helped to set the starting point of the next within-saccade process. These results imply a novel role for functional information-processing loops in optimizing saccade generation in dynamic environments.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Saccades are the rapid, ballistic eye movements that we make approximately three times every second to scan the visual scene for interesting things to look at. The apparent ease with which we produce saccades belies their computational sophistication, which can be studied quantitatively in the laboratory to provide insights into how our brain manages the interplay between sensory input and motor output. The present work is important because we show for the first time how this interplay operates both within and across saccades to ensure that these eye movements are guided effectively by learned expectations in dynamic environments. More generally, this study shows how sensory-motor decision processes, typically studied in isolation, interact via functional information-processing loops in the brain to produce complex, adaptive behaviors.