Effects of Cortical Microstimulation on Confidence in a Perceptual Decision

Overview

Journal Neuron

Publisher Cell Press

Specialty Neurology

Date 2014 Aug 16

PMID 25123306

Citations 73

Authors

Christopher R Fetsch

Roozbeh Kiani

William T Newsome

Michael N Shadlen

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Decisions are often associated with a degree of certainty, or confidence--an estimate of the probability that the chosen option will be correct. Recent neurophysiological results suggest that the central processing of evidence leading to a perceptual decision also establishes a level of confidence. Here we provide a causal test of this hypothesis by electrically stimulating areas of the visual cortex involved in motion perception. Monkeys discriminated the direction of motion in a noisy display and were sometimes allowed to opt out of the direction choice if their confidence was low. Microstimulation did not reduce overall confidence in the decision but instead altered confidence in a manner that mimicked a change in visual motion, plus a small increase in sensory noise. The results suggest that the same sensory neural signals support choice, reaction time, and confidence in a decision and that artificial manipulation of these signals preserves the quantitative relationship between accumulated evidence and confidence.

Citing Articles

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Human-like dissociations between confidence and accuracy in convolutional neural networks.

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Neural basis of concurrent deliberation toward a choice and degree of confidence.

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Dorsal pulvinar inactivation leads to spatial selection bias without perceptual deficit.

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