The role of dorsal premotor cortex in decision-making and action selection
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Why do we do the things we do? Understanding cognition is a key step towards understanding our diverse perspectives and behaviors. Over the years, the study of decision-making in neuroscience has shed light on the black box of cognition. Decision-making is the process of arriving at one choice out of multiple alternatives, and correlates of this process have been found in many sensory- and motor-related brain structures. However, we do not have a full account of the way in which brain regions participate in this process, especially given the many potential forms that decision-making can take. Here, we focus in on the dorsal premotor cortex (PMd), a frontal brain region involved in motor preparation and execution, decision-making, and goal-oriented action. We use a perceptual decision-making task in which the subject reports the perceived dominant color of a red-and-green checkerboard by reaching to the corresponding colored target. Studies have previously found that the activity of PMd neurons correlate with the choice report, the evidence supporting that choice, and the time taken to deliberate upon the choice. We now ask: To what extent is PMd involved in the perceptual aspect of decision-making, and how do motor costs affect the decision-making process? First, we separate the perceptual process (whether the checkerboard is mostly red or green) from the motor process (to reach left or right) by presenting a checkerboard decision cue without providing information on how to report. We found that PMd neurons did not encode information about the perceptual color choice, but did exhibit decision-related activity when the subject was able to report the choice. We next randomly assign the positions of the target choices to be near or far relative to the hand's starting position. We found that performance was biased towards the choice that was closer to the animal, and that these target configurations were reflected in neural activity during the report epoch as well. These findings suggest that PMd involvement in the decision process is primarily in an action-decision space, and that relevant motor and perceptual information are combined at the same time. These results provide stepping stones towards understanding how brain regions drive our perception and behavior.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2019; ©2019 |
| Publication date | 2019; 2019 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Wang, Megan | |
|---|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Shenoy, Krishna V. (Krishna Vaughn) | |
| Thesis advisor | Shenoy, Krishna V. (Krishna Vaughn) | |
| Thesis advisor | Baccus, Stephen A | |
| Thesis advisor | Moore, Tirin, 1969- | |
| Thesis advisor | Newsome, William T | |
| Degree committee member | Baccus, Stephen A | |
| Degree committee member | Moore, Tirin, 1969- | |
| Degree committee member | Newsome, William T | |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Neurosciences Program. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Megan Wang. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Neurosciences Program. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2019. |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2019 by Megan Wang
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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