Attention, reward, and information seeking.
Decision making is thought to be guided by the values of alternative options and involve the accumulation of evidence to an internal bound. However, in natural behavior, evidence accumulation is an active process whereby subjects decide when and which sensory stimulus to sample. These sampling decisions are naturally served by attention and rapid eye movements (saccades), but little is known about how saccades are controlled to guide future actions. Here we review evidence that was discussed at a recent symposium, which suggests that information selection involves basal ganglia and cortical mechanisms and that, across different contexts, it is guided by two central factors: the gains in reward and gains in information (uncertainty reduction) associated with sensory cues.
Department of Neuroscience and Kavli Institute for Brain Science, Columbia University, New York, New York 10032, jg2141@columbia.edu.
Jacqueline
http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6507-4375
J
Gottlieb
University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas 78712.
Mary
M
Hayhoe
Laboratory of Sensorimotor Research, National Eye Institute, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland 20892.
Okihide
O
Hikosaka
Division of Humanities and Social Sciences and Computational and Neural Systems, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California 91125, and.
Antonio
A
Rangel
D000818:Animals; D001288:Attention; D001479:Basal Ganglia / Q000502:physiology; D002540:Cerebral Cortex / Q000502:physiology; D002755:Choice Behavior / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D057226:Information Seeking Behavior / Q000502:physiology*; D012201:Reward; D012438:Saccades / Q000502:physiology