title: The Encoding of Decision Difficulty and Movement Time in the Primate Premotor Cortex.
abstract: Estimating the difficulty of a decision is a fundamental process to elaborate complex and adaptive behaviour. In this paper, we show that the movement time of behaving monkeys performing a decision-making task is correlated with decision difficulty and that the activity of a population of neurons in ventral Premotor cortex correlates with the movement time. Moreover, we found another population of neurons that encodes the discriminability of the stimulus, thereby supplying another source of information about the difficulty of the decision. The activity of neurons encoding the difficulty can be produced by very different computations. Therefore, we show that decision difficulty can be encoded through three different mechanisms: 1. Switch time coding, 2. rate coding and 3. binary coding. This rich representation reflects the basis of different functional aspects of difficulty in the making of a decision and the possible role of difficulty estimation in complex decision scenarios.
authors.affiliation: Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience Center for Brain and Cognition, Barcelona, Spain.|Department of Ophthalmology and Institute of Neuropathology, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany.
authors.forename: Marina
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Martinez-Garcia
authors.affiliation: Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience Center for Brain and Cognition, Barcelona, Spain.
authors.forename: Andrea
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Insabato
authors.affiliation: Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience Center for Brain and Cognition, Barcelona, Spain.
authors.forename: Mario
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Pannunzi
authors.affiliation: Circuit Dynamics & Computation Laboratory, Champalimaud Neuroscience Programme, Lisboa, Portugal.|Departamento de Fisiología, Facultad de Medicina, Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, Santiago de Compostela, Spain.
authors.forename: Jose L
authors.initials: JL
authors.lastname: Pardo-Vazquez
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Fisiología, Facultad de Medicina, Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, Santiago de Compostela, Spain.
authors.forename: Carlos
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Acuña
authors.affiliation: Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience Center for Brain and Cognition, Barcelona, Spain.|Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats (ICREA), Barcelona, Spain.
authors.forename: Gustavo
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Deco
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D000818:Animals; D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods*; D003657:Decision Making / Q000502:physiology*; D008253:Macaca mulatta; D008297:Male; D008959:Models, Neurological; D009044:Motor Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D011597:Psychomotor Performance / Q000502:physiology*; D013997:Time Factors