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，需要整合关于世界的当前感官信息和关于环境意外情况的存储知识。最近，神经生理学家已经开始识别与决策形成相关的高级感觉和运动脑区域的神经活动。在外侧顶内区(LIP)，神经元编码决策变量，如预期奖赏大小、结果概率和视觉运动任务中选择的主观愿望；这些信息既不是感觉也不是运动，而是指导有效的决策。然而，到目前为止，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：现实世界的决定发生在不同时间的不同选择之间，结果不同。这项研究的目标是开发一种心理物理测试来及时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是如何在嘴唇中决策相关神经元的活动中表征的。这项研究试图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.