Brain-wide dynamics linking sensation to action during decision-making.

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Cognitive Science
• Computational Neuroscience

Background:

• Perceptual decisions link sensory input to actions through evidence integration.
• The orchestration of sensory processing, evidence accumulation, and motor control across brain areas remains poorly understood.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how brain-wide neural activity orchestrates transformations from sensory input to action execution during decision-making.
• To map the flow of information across brain regions during learned perceptual decisions.

Main Methods:

• Recorded brain-wide neural activity in mice performing a visual evidence-reporting task.
• Analyzed neural population dynamics related to evidence integration, movement preparation, and execution.

Main Results:

• Evidence integration emerged across widespread brain areas, driving movement-preparatory activity.
• Visual information transformed from transient sensory responses to sustained representations supporting parallel evidence accumulation.
• Shared population activity encoded evidence and movement preparation, distinct from movement execution.
• Evidence integration timescales were task-experience dependent, not intrinsic to brain regions.

Conclusions:

• Learning aligns evidence accumulation with action preparation across numerous brain regions.
• Decision-making involves highly distributed and parallelized sensorimotor transformations.
• A brain-wide framework is proposed for understanding how sensory evidence guides actions.