Neural correlates of perceptual decision-making in the primary somatosensory cortex

The brain is thought to produce decisions by gradual accumulation of sensory evidence through a hierarchically organized feedforward cascade of neuronal activities that transforms early stimulus representations in the primary somatosensory cortex (S1) to a perceptual decision processed in premotor areas. Recently, this prevailing view has been challenged by observation of choice-correlated neural activity as early in the hierarchy as S1. Here, to reconcile these seemingly controversial observations, we employ ethological whisker-guided navigation of mice in a tactile virtual reality paradigm combined with dense electrophysiological recordings in whisker-related wS1. Leaving only a pair of C2 whiskers for mice to navigate with, we effectively designed an information bottleneck for sensory input to decision-making. We show that neural activity during sensory evidence accumulation exhibits dramatic collapse of the high-dimensional spiking activity to just a single latent variable followed by a slower and almost synchronous ramping up across the whole cortical column. We show that this variable is consistent with models of gradual accumulation of noisy sensory evidence to a decision bound. These observations indicate that S1 may directly participate in a categorical coding of all-or-none decision variable via cortico-cortical feedback loops through which sensory information reverberates to be transformed into perception and action.