Selectivity-specialized feedback connections mediate the interaction of distinct neural processes during flexible decision-making

Abstract

AbstractNeural activity in the primate brain correlates with both sensory evaluation and action selection aspects of decision-making. However, the neural mechanisms underlying the interplay between these processes remain unclear. Here, we examined the modulation of sensory evaluation by action selection in posterior parietal cortex (PPC) when monkeys used saccade choices to report their decisions about visual stimuli in a flexible decision task. We found that the PPC activity related to monkeys’ abstract decisions about the visual stimuli was significantly modulated by monkeys’ following saccade choices directing outside each neuron’s response field. Modeling with recurrent neural networks trained to perform the same task indicated that the feedback connections that matched the learned stimuli-response associations during the task mediated the interplay of these decision processes and were necessary for efficiently generating flexible decisions. These results indicate an iterative computation between different decision processes that could be mediated primarily by precise feedback connectivity, and potentially provide a novel framework for decision-making.