Multi-areal neural dynamics encode human decision making

Abstract

Value-based decision-making involves multiple cortical and subcortical brain areas, but the exact nature of neural activity underlying choice behavior has been difficult to parse out in the human brain. Here, we use intracranial recordings from neurosurgical patients to decode trial-by-trial choice, showing that information related to expressed choices is contained in high frequency bands (gamma, high frequency activity) and is distributed across multiple brain regions, suggesting that distributed processes underlie human decisions under uncertainty. Furthermore, our results show that reward-based choices can be robustly decoded on a trial-by-trial basis from anatomically distributed iEEG signals.