Changes-of mind in target selection for action

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The Directorate of Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences offers postdoctoral research fellowships to provide opportunities for recent doctoral graduates to obtain additional training, to gain research experience under the sponsorship of established scientists, and to broaden their scientific horizons beyond their undergraduate and graduate training. Postdoctoral fellowships are further designed to assist new scientists to direct their research efforts across traditional disciplinary lines and to avail themselves of unique research resources, sites, and facilities, including at foreign locations. This postdoctoral fellowship supports a rising scientist in the interdisciplinary area overlapping behavioral science, computational modeling and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), focusing on the process of decision making. Decision-making is a pervasive part of everyday life: in some cases, decisions are irreversible and in others an initial choice can be altered by a change of mind. For instance, when fetching a book off the shelf, one may initially reach toward the wrong title and later adjust the course of their reach in favor of the desired option. Such decisions require precise coordination between several brain systems to allocate attention, select a course of action, and execute hand and eye movements. Importantly, recent research demonstrates that cognition is tightly integrated with perception and action. Specifically, motor areas supporting the execution of eye and hand movements are also critically involved in decision-making; however, while the neural networks of decision-making are relatively well characterized, little is known about how the brain supports online changes to behavior after a decision to act has been executed. This proposal aims to investigate the brain systems supporting the ability to continuously modify decisions during target selection and determine how competition for attentional resources impacts this process. The results of this project will advance our understanding of the brain structures and neural information flow underlying rapid, flexible decision-making during action execution. This has important implications for informing impairments caused by disorders such as traumatic brain injury, stroke, and optic ataxia and the design of more advanced neural prosthetics to better serve amputees in dynamic, real-life settings.The goal of this research is to provide a more comprehensive understanding of human decision-making by examining how multiple brain systems interact to support changes of mind during target selection. Using a multi-faceted approach including behavioral, electroencephalography (EEG), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and advanced computational modeling techniques, this proposal will investigate the neural substrates that support rapid decision adjustments when executing actions. Specifically, how does the allocation of spatial attention during target selection impact change of mind? Moreover, what is the nature of information flow between higher-order cortical regions and eye- and hand-related motor areas during changes of mind during target selection? These results will represent an important step toward a more complete understanding of the brain mechanisms involved in complex human decision-making in naturalistic settings. This proposal is also supported by the NSF EPSCoR.