Overlapping and unique neural circuits are activated during perceptual decision making and confidence

Abstract

Word count: 178)Perceptual decisions are naturally accompanied by a sense of confidence in the accuracy of the decision. However, it remains unclear whether perceptual decision making and confidence are supported by the same or different neural circuits. To address this question, we conducted two functional MRI (fMRI) experiments in which we dissociated the periods related to perceptual decision making and confidence by either decorrelating their respective regressors or asking for confidence ratings only in the second half of the experiment. We found that perceptual decision making and confidence were supported by large and mostly overlapping brain circuits including frontal, parietal, posterior, and cingulate regions with the results being remarkably consistent across the two experiments. Further, the confidence period recruited a number of unique regions, whereas there was no evidence for the decision period recruiting unique regions not involved in the confidence period. These results suggest that the neural circuits supporting perceptual decision making and confidence have a very high degree of overlap, which suggests largely shared computational mechanisms with unique components for the confidence but not for the perceptual judgments.

Early neural activity changes associated with visual conscious perception

“…Numerous studies have identified frontoparietal networks involved in perceptual decisionmaking process (Kable and Glimcher, 2009;Li et al, 2009;Siegel et al, 2011;Mulder et al, 2012;Keuken et al, 2014;Yeon et al, 2020). In line with our findings (Figure 2A and Figure 3A), frontal areas of perceptual decision-making networks reported in the literature included inferior frontal gyrus, middle frontal gyrus, superior frontal gyrus, and orbitofrontal cortex.…”

“…Indeed, activity within the lateral intraparietal cortex has been shown to reflect accumulation of sensory evidence prior to response (Shadlen and Newsome, 2001). The changes observed in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) (Figure 2A) correspond with prior studies suggesting that the ACC may be involved in guiding decision making and providing the appropriate target-specific response (Thielscher and Pessoa, 2007;Scheibe et al, 2010;Yeon et al, 2020).…”

Task learning is subserved by a domain-general brain network

“…To explore this possibility, we examined the contrast between Blocks 1 and 2 separately for each of the six tasks. Previous imaging studies have demonstrated that visual perception tasks activate the visual cortex (Grill-Spector & Malach, 2004; Heeger, 1999), that top-down attention tasks activate the dorsal attention network (Corbetta & Shulman, 2002; Rahnev et al, 2012), that expectation tasks activate the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, intraparietal sulcus, and medial temporal cortex (Rahnev, Lau, et al, 2011), that speedaccuracy trade-off tasks activate the supplementary motor area (Forstmann et al, 2008; Spieser et al, 2017), that metacognitive tasks activate the anterior prefrontal cortex, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and anterior cingulate (Rahnev et al, 2016; Shekhar & Rahnev, 2018; Yeon et al, 2020), and that motor control tasks activate motor and premotor cortices (Laut Ebbesen & Brecht, 2017; Svoboda & Li, 2018). A domain-specific account of task learning would predict that the same areas involved in the execution of each task would also be activated when learning the corresponding task.…”

Quantifying the contribution of subject and group factors in brain activation

“…Here we have provisionally classified all analyses as either “task-based” or “behavior-based.” However, it could be that rather than a binary distinction, there is more of a continuum of analysis types. For example, examining the differential activations of two different tasks (Yeon et al, 2020) may show slightly higher idiosyncrasy levels than examining the activations of a single task in isolation (as in the current analyses). Similarly, analyses that compare internal states (e.g., aroused vs. unaroused, excited vs. bored) (Rosenberg et al, 2020) or the effects of brain stimulation (Chen et al, 2013; Rafiei et al, 2021) may show yet greater levels of idiosyncrasy despite our provisional classification of such analyses as “task-based.”…”