Brain-wide coordination of internal signals during decision-making

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Cognitive Science
• Computational Neuroscience

Background:

• Neural correlates of decision-making are widespread but poorly understood.
• The coordination of brain-wide decision signals remains an open question.
• Investigating whether decision computations are shared or competing across regions.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how brain-wide decision signals are coordinated during evidence accumulation.
• To determine if decision computations are locally generated and broadcast or distributed.
• To identify the origin and propagation of decision signals across brain regions.

Main Methods:

• Simultaneous neural recordings from thousands of neurons across up to twenty brain regions in rats.
• Rats performed a decision-making task involving gradual auditory evidence accumulation.
• Decoding of time-varying decision states and decision commitment timing from neural activity.

Main Results:

• Strong moment-by-moment co-fluctuations in decision states across regions, spanning a single dimension.
• Shared decision signals were strongest and earliest detected in frontal cortical regions and anterior striatum.
• Decision commitment timing also showed strong, dimensionally unified co-fluctuations, strongest in motor cortex.

Conclusions:

• Decision computations are integrated and shared across the brain via a single dominant dimension.
• Decision signals are computed in a small subnetwork (frontal cortex, striatum) and globally propagated.
• Decision commitment marks a critical transition in coordinated brain activity, originating in motor cortex.