Choices in time and neural activity in parietal cortex

描述（由申请人提供）：决策是一个复杂的过程，需要整合当前关于世界的感官信息和存储的关于环境突发事件的知识。最近，神经生理学家已经开始识别与决策形成相关的高阶感觉和运动脑区域的神经活动。在侧顶叶内区（LIP），神经元在视觉运动任务中编码决策变量，如预期奖励大小、结果概率和主观选择的可取性；这些信息既不是感官的，也不是运动的，而是指导有效的决策。然而，迄今为止的决策研究忽略了关于时间的信息，这是选择行为的一个关键因素：现实世界的决策发生在不同时间有不同结果的选择之间。本研究的目标是开发一种心理物理测试来量化灵长类动物的选择行为，并利用这一任务来探索这种时间信息如何在LIP中决策相关神经元的活动中表现出来。本研究旨在探索时间选择的神经基础，以及将时间信息整合到决策过程中。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Decision-making is a complex process requiring the integration of both current sensory information about the world and stored knowledge about environmental contingencies. Recently, neurophysiologists have begun to identify neural activity in higher order sensory and motor brain regions that correlates with decision formation. In the lateral intraparietal area (LIP), neurons encode decision variables such as expected reward magnitude, outcome probability, and subjective desirability of choices during a visuomotor task; this information is neither sensory nor motor but guides effective decision-making. Decision studies to date, however, have ignored information about time, a crucial element of choice behavior: real world decisions occur between choices with different outcomes at different times. The goal of the proposed research is to develop a psychophysical test to quantify primate choice behavior in time, and employ this task to explore how such temporal information is represented in the activity of decision-related neurons in LIP. This research seeks to explore both the neural basis of choice in time as well as the integration of temporal information into decision processes.