Decoupling Choice from Motor Response Reduces Choice-History Effects

Perception and action form a loop as an organism interacts with its environment. Here, we probe the interdependence between the two in the context of choice-history effects, the tendency of past choices and their outcomes to bias current choices. We investigated if the modulation by previous choices depended on the coupling between perceptual choices and the motor responses reporting these choices. We analyzed data from non-human primates (Macaca mulatta; three females and five males) performing two different perceptual decision-making tasks. Each task had a "coupled" variant with a fixed mapping between perceptual choices and motor plans used to report the choice, and an "uncoupled" variant, in which this mapping varied randomly across trials. We found that, in both tasks, the animals in the coupled variant had larger choice-history effects compared to the animals in the uncoupled variant. Decoupling choices from motor responses was further associated with an inability by the animals to learn experimentally induced stimulus sequence regularities. Together, these findings identify choice-response coupling as a factor shaping animals' ability to use recent history to guide behavior and highlight the tight link between cognitive and motor processes.