Choices in time and neural activity in parietal cortex

决策是一个复杂的过程，需要整合当前的感官信息， 世界和存储的知识有关的环境突发事件。最近，神经生理学家开始 识别与决策相关的高级感觉和运动脑区域的神经活动， 阵在外侧顶内区（LIP），神经元编码决策变量，如预期奖励 视觉任务中选择的大小、结果概率和主观愿望;这 信息既不是感官的，也不是运动的，而是指导有效决策的。迄今为止的决策研究， 然而，他们忽略了关于时间的信息，这是选择行为的一个关键因素：真实的世界决策 发生在不同时间不同结果的选择之间。拟议研究的目标是 开发一个心理物理测试来量化灵长类动物的选择行为，并利用这个任务来探索 这些时间信息如何在LIP中决策相关神经元的活动中表现出来。这 研究试图探索时间选择的神经基础以及时间的整合。 信息进入决策过程。

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.