Magnetoencephalography decoding reveals structural differences within integrative decision processes

• Published in: Nature human behaviour Vol. 2; no. 9; pp. 670 - 681
• Main Authors: Eldar, Eran, Bae, Gyung Jin, Kurth-Nelson, Zeb, Dayan, Peter, Dolan, Raymond J.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Nature Publishing Group UK 01.09.2018; Nature Publishing Group
• Subjects: 631/378/2649/1409; 631/477/2811; Behavioral Sciences; Biomedical and Life Sciences; Decoding; Experimental Psychology; Individual differences; Letter; Life Sciences; Magnetoencephalography; Microeconomics; Neuroimaging; Neurosciences; Personality and Social Psychology; Reinstatement; Research subjects; Task complexity
• ISSN: 2397-3374; 2397-3374
• DOI: 10.1038/s41562-018-0423-3

When confronted with complex inputs consisting of multiple elements, humans use various strategies to integrate the elements quickly and accurately. For instance, accuracy may be improved by processing elements one at a time 1 – 4 or over extended periods 5 – 8 ; speed can increase if the internal representation of elements is accelerated 9 , 10 . However, little is known about how humans actually approach these challenges because behavioural findings can be accounted for by multiple alternative process models 11 and neuroimaging investigations typically rely on haemodynamic signals that change too slowly. Consequently, to uncover the fast neural dynamics that support information integration, we decoded magnetoencephalographic signals that were recorded as human subjects performed a complex decision task. Our findings reveal three sources of individual differences in the temporal structure of the integration process—sequential representation, partial reinstatement and early computation—each having a dissociable effect on how subjects handled problem complexity and temporal constraints. Our findings shed new light on the structure and influence of self-determined neural integration processes. People differ in how they cope with task complexity and time constraints. Eldar et al. use magnetoencephalography to show that these differences can be explained by the temporal organization of a neural information integration process.