همایش بین المللی هوش مصنوعی

صفحه اصلی / دومین همایش بین المللی هوش مصنوعی

Simultaneous representation of decision variable and saccade direction in the parietal cortex

نویسندگان :

Zahra Naghdabadi¹ Amirreza Bahramani²

1- PhD from Sharif University of Technology 2- PhD from Sharif University of Technology

کلمات کلیدی :

LIP،saccade،decision-making،population analysis،dimension reduction

چکیده :

Neurons in the lateral intraparietal area (LIP) maintain elevated activity during saccadic eye movements and also fire when a salient cue is in their receptive field. Most of the time, humans and animals plan to make saccades to salient targets (based on physical appearance or their goal). It is unknown whether LIP’s activity is dominated by the current focus of attention or preparation for the next-saccade (attention vs. intention debate). In addition to representing the next-saccade, area LIP represents the decision variable during decision-making as some LIP neurons’ responses are best explained by the accumulated evidence in favor of the chosen target. Since in some decision-making tasks, choice is reported by a saccade, it is unknown whether pre-choice activity of LIP neurons is neural representation of the decision variable or the saccade (or both). If LIP represents both signals, then it is not known whether the decision variable and the next-saccade are represented within the same neuronal population or in separate populations. We addressed these questions using population analysis on neural data recorded from macaques during a perceptual decision-making task. We found that the same population of LIP neurons represents the decision variable and the next-saccade. Simultaneous encoding of these information occurs in linearly separable subspaces of the latent space, making it easily distinguishable and communicated to distinct downstream areas. We hypothesize that by doing so, LIP can have an active role in the decision-formation process while simultaneously conveying information about the next saccadic eye movement.