Humans strategically shift decision bias by flexibly adjusting sensory evidence accumulation

Decision bias is traditionally conceptualized as an internal reference against which sensory evidence is compared. Instead, we show that individuals implement decision bias by shifting the rate of sensory evidence accumulation toward a decision bound. Participants performed a target detection task w...

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Bibliographic Details
Published ineLife Vol. 8
Main Authors Kloosterman, Niels A, de Gee, Jan Willem, Werkle-Bergner, Markus, Lindenberger, Ulman, Garrett, Douglas D, Fahrenfort, Johannes Jacobus
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published England eLife Sciences Publications Ltd 06.02.2019
eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd
Subjects
Alpha Rhythm - physiology
Bias
Clinical decision making
Cortex (somatosensory)
decision bias
Decision Making
drift diffusion modeling
EEG
Electroencephalography
Excitability
Female
Humans
Male
Motor Activity - physiology
neural excitability
neural oscillations
Neuroscience
Noise
perceptual decision-making
Photic Stimulation
Reinforcement
Sensation
Task Performance and Analysis
Theta Rhythm - physiology
Time Factors
Visual cortex
Visual Cortex - physiology
Young Adult
United States > US
Berlin Germany
Netherlands
perceptual decision-making
electroencephalography
drift diffusion modeling
decision bias
neuroscience
neural excitability
neural oscillations
human
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Summary:Decision bias is traditionally conceptualized as an internal reference against which sensory evidence is compared. Instead, we show that individuals implement decision bias by shifting the rate of sensory evidence accumulation toward a decision bound. Participants performed a target detection task while we recorded EEG. We experimentally manipulated participants' decision criterion for reporting targets using different stimulus-response reward contingencies, inducing either a liberal or a conservative bias. Drift diffusion modeling revealed that a liberal strategy biased sensory evidence accumulation toward target-present choices. Moreover, a liberal bias resulted in stronger midfrontal pre-stimulus 2-6 Hz (theta) power and suppression of pre-stimulus 8-12 Hz (alpha) power in posterior cortex. Alpha suppression in turn was linked to the output activity in visual cortex, as expressed through 59-100 Hz (gamma) power. These findings show that observers can intentionally control cortical excitability to strategically bias evidence accumulation toward the decision bound that maximizes reward.
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These authors contributed equally to this work.
ISSN:2050-084X
2050-084X
DOI:10.7554/eLife.37321