Humans anticipate the consequences of motor control demands when making perceptual decisions between actions

Abstract

Animals, including humans, are often faced with situations where they must decide between potential actions to perform based on various sources of information, including movement parameters that incur time and energy costs. Consistent with this fact, many behavioral studies indicate that decisions and actions show a high level of integration during goal-directed behavior. In particular, motor costs very often bias the choice process of human and non-human subjects facing successive decisions between actions. However, it appears as well that depending on the design in which the experiment occurs, the effect of motor costs on decisions can vary or even vanish. This suggests a contextual dependence of the influence of motor costs on decision-making. Moreover, it is not currently known whether or not the impact of motor costs on perceptual decisions depend on the difficulty of the decision. We addressed these two important issues by studying the behavior of healthy human subjects engaged in a new perceptual decision-making paradigm in which the constraint level associated with the movement executed to report a choice was volitionally chosen by the participants, and in which the difficulty of the perceptual decision to make continuously evolved depending on their motor performance. The results indicate that the level of constraint associated with a movement executed to express a perceptual decision strongly impacts the duration of these decisions, with a shortening of decisions when these are expressed by demanding movements. This influence appears most important when the decisions are difficult, but it is also present for easy decisions. We interpret this strategy as an adaptive way to optimize the participants’ overall rate of success at the session level.