Brain-behavior relationships in the perceptual decision-making process through cognitive processing stages

Perceptual decision making ? the process of detecting and categorizing information ? has been studied extensively over the last two decades. In this study, we aim to bridge the gap between neural and behavioral representations of the perceptual decision-making process. The neural characterization of decision-making was investigated by evaluating the duration and neural signature of the information processing stages. We further evaluated the processing stages of the decision-making process at the behavioral level by estimating the drift rate and non-decision time parameters. We asked whether the neural and behavioral characterizations of the decision-making process provided consistent results under different stimulus coherency levels and spatial attention. Our statistical analysis revealed that, at both representational levels, decision-making was affected more by the coherency factor. We further found that among different information processing stages, the decision stage had the highest role in the performance of the decision-making process. Such that, the shorter decision stage duration at the neural level and higher drift rate at the behavioral level lead to faster decision-making. Through our consistent neural and behavioral results, we have shown that the decision-making components at these two representational levels were significantly associated. Moreover, the neural signature of the processing stages gave information about the regions that contributed more to the decision-making process. Our overall results demonstrate that uncovering the cognitive processing stages provided more insights into the decisionmaking process.

Automated summary

The study investigated the neural and behavioral representations of perceptual decision-making and found that decision-making was more influenced by coherence factor under different stimulus conditions and attention levels. The decision stage was identified to play a crucial role in the performance of the decision-making process.