Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 105, Issue 45, Pages 17538-17542Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0805903105
Keywords
basal ganglia; fMRI; linear ballistic accumulator model; speed-accuracy tradeoff
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Funding
- National Institutes of Health [R01 MH74457]
- Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research
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Human decision-making almost always takes place under time pressure. When people are engaged in activities such as shopping, driving, or playing chess, they have to continually balance the demands for fast decisions against the demands for accurate decisions. In the cognitive sciences, this balance is thought to be modulated by a response threshold, the neural substrate of which is currently subject to speculation. in a speed decision-making experiment, we presented participants with cues that indicated different requirements for response speed. Application of a mathematical model for the behavioral data confirmed that cueing for speed lowered the response threshold. Functional neuroimaging showed that cueing for speed activates the striatum and the pre-supplementary motor area (pre-SMA), brain structures that are part of a closed-loop motor circuit involved in the preparation of voluntary action plans. Moreover, activation in the striatum is known to release the motor system from global inhibition, thereby facilitating faster but possibly premature actions. Finally, the data show that individual variation in the activation of striatum and pre-SMA is selectively associated with individual variation in the amplitude of the adjustments in the response threshold estimated by the mathematical model. These results demonstrate that when people have to make decisions tinder time pressure their striatum and pre-SMA show increased levels of activation.
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