Skip to main content
Dryad

Data from: Transitions in dynamical regime and neural mode underlie perceptual decision-making

Luo, Thomas1; Kim, Timothy1; Gupta, Diksha2; Bondy, Adrian1; Kopec, Charles1; Elliott, Verity1; DePasquale, Brian3; Brody, Carlos1

Published May 14, 2025 on Dryad. https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.sj3tx96dm

Data files

May 14, 2025 version files 4.17 GB

Click names to download individual files

Abstract

Perceptual decision-making is the process by which an animal uses sensory stimuli to choose an action or mental proposition. This process is thought to be mediated by neurons organized as attractor networks. However, whether attractor dynamics underlie decision behavior and the complex neuronal responses remains unclear. Here we use simultaneous recordings from hundreds of neurons, together with an unsupervised, deep learning-based method, to discover decision-related neural dynamics in frontal cortex and striatum of rats while the subjects accumulate pulsatile auditory evidence.

The data set consists of spike times from simultaneously recorded neurons, along with the timing of the sensory stimuli and the rat's actions for each trial. Recordings were made from 12 rats across 115 daily sessions, 84-663 units recorded per session (median: 327) and 157 to 854 trials completed per session (median: 455).

We found that trajectories evolved along two sequential regimes, the first dominated by sensory inputs, and the second dominated by the autonomous dynamics, with flow in a direction (i.e., “neural mode”) largely orthogonal to that in the first regime. We propose that the second regime corresponds to decision commitment. We developed a simplified model that approximates the coupled transition in dynamics and neural mode and allows precise inference, from each trial’s large-scale neural population activity, of a putative internal decision commitment time in that trial. The simplified model captures diverse and complex single-neuron temporal profiles, such as ramping and stepping. It also captures trial-averaged curved trajectories, and reveals distinctions between brain regions. The putative neurally-inferred commitment times (“nTc”) occurred at times broadly distributed across trials, and not time-locked to stimulus onset, offset, or response onset. Nevertheless, when trials were aligned to nTc, behavioral analysis showed that, as predicted by a decision commitment time, sensory evidence before nTc affected the subjects’ decision, but evidence after nTc did not. Our results show that the formation of a perceptual choice involves a rapid, coordinated transition in both the dynamical regime and the neural mode of the decision process, and suggest the moment of commitment to be a useful entry point for dissecting mechanisms underlying rapid changes in internal state.