Is the impact of spontaneous movements on early visual cortex species specific?

Recent studies in non-human primates do not find pronounced signals related to the animal's own body movements in the responses of neurons in the visual cortex. This is notable because such pronounced signals have been widely observed in the visual cortex of mice. Here, we discuss factors that may contribute to the differences observed between species, such as state, slow neural drift, eccentricity, and changes in retinal input.

Tracking the evolution of a single choice.

Measuring the activity of hundreds of neurons in macaque brains simultaneously provides further evidence that drift-diffusion dynamics underlie how decisions are made in the brain.

Confirmation Bias through Selective Use of Evidence in Human Cortex.

Decision-makers often process new evidence selectively, depending on their current beliefs about the world. We asked whether such confirmation biases result from biases in the encoding of sensory evidence in the brain, or alternatively in the utilization of encoded evidence for behavior. Human participants estimated the source of a sequence of visual-spatial evidence samples while we measured cortical population activity with magnetoencephalography (MEG).

Activity in primate visual cortex is minimally driven by spontaneous movements.

Organisms process sensory information in the context of their own moving bodies, an idea referred to as embodiment. This idea is important for developmental neuroscience, robotics and systems neuroscience. The mechanisms supporting embodiment are unknown, but a manifestation could be the observation in mice of brain-wide neuromodulation, including in the primary visual cortex, driven by task-irrelevant spontaneous body movements.

Decision making: How the past guides the future in frontal cortex.

Our judgments of our environment are often shaped by heuristics and prior experience. New research shows that the resulting biases are encoded, and combined with new sensory input, by groups of neurons in the frontal cortex during decisions under uncertainty.

Choices change the temporal weighting of decision evidence.

Many decisions result from the accumulation of decision-relevant information (evidence) over time. Even when maximizing decision accuracy requires weighting all the evidence equally, decision-makers often give stronger weight to evidence occurring early or late in the evidence stream. Here, we show changes in such temporal biases within participants as a function of intermittent judgments about parts of the evidence stream.

Confirmation Bias through Selective Overweighting of Choice-Consistent Evidence.

People's assessments of the state of the world often deviate systematically from the information available to them [1]. Such biases can originate from people's own decisions: committing to a categorical proposition, or a course of action, biases subsequent judgment and decision-making. This phenomenon, called confirmation bias [2], has been explained as suppression of post-decisional dissonance [3, 4].

Confidence-based integrated reweighting model of task-difficulty explains location-based specificity in perceptual learning.

Perceptual learning is classically thought to be highly specific to the trained stimuli's retinal locations. However, recent research using a novel double-training paradigm has found dramatic transfer of perceptual learning to untrained locations. These results challenged existing models of perceptual learning and provoked intense debate in the field.