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Focused Review ARTICLE

Temporal dynamics underlying perceptual decision making: Insights from the interplay between an attractor model and parietal neurophysiology

1
Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics, Center for the Study of Brain, Mind and Behavior, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA
2
Section of Neurobiology, Center for Perceptual Systems, Department of Psychology, The University of Texas at Austin, TX, USA
Recent neurophysiological studies in awake, behaving primates have revealed that neurons in certain brain areas appear to integrate sensory evidence over time during the performance of perceptual decision-making tasks. Neurons in the lateral intraparietal area (LIP) of rhesus monkeys exhibit such decision-related signals while the animals view and judge the direction of a visual motion display. Further investigation of this temporal integration process using brief perturbations of the sensory evidence has suggested that LIP neurons do not integrate evidence in a perfect, linear manner. We describe how a biophysically-plausible attractor network model can account for many aspects of the temporal dynamics of neural activity during these perceptual decisions. We also review a larger set of models and explain how the dynamics during and after temporal integration can help to distinguish the underlying neural mechanisms. Finally, we propose some crucial theoretically-motivated experiments that are needed to test among models.
Keywords:
perceptual decision making, sensorimotor integration, parietal cortex, computational modeling, attractor neural network
Citation:
Wong K-F and Huk AC (2008). Temporal dynamics underlying perceptual decision making: Insights from the interplay between an attractor model and parietal neurophysiology. Front. Neurosci. 2,2:245- 254. doi: 10.3389/neuro.01.028.2008
Received:
19 September 2008;
 Paper pending published:
05 November 2008;
Accepted:
05 November 2008;
 Published online:
15 December 2008.

Edited by:

Misha Tsodyks, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel

Reviewed by:

Walter Senn, University of Bern, Switzerland
Harel Z. Shouval, University of Texas Medical School at Houston, USA
Copyright:
© 2008 Wong and Huk. This is an open-access article subject to an exclusive license agreement between the authors and the Frontiers Research Foundation, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original authors and source are credited.
*Correspondence:
Kong-Fatt Wong, Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics, Center for the Study of Brain, Mind and Behavior, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA. e-mail: kfwong@math.princeton.edu; Alexander C. Huk, Section of Neurobiology, Center for Perceptual Systems, Department of Psychology, University of Texas at Austin, TX 78712, USA. e-mail: huk@mail.utexas.edu

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