# Computational and circuit mechanisms of decision making

> **NIH NIH R01** · COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY HEALTH SCIENCES · 2022 · $432,091

## Abstract

Abstract
The neurobiology of perceptual decision-making elucidates fundamental neural mechanisms of higher cognitive
function, the understanding of which will inspire new strategies to treat neurological and psychiatric diseases
affecting thought, perception and awareness. The inquiry focuses on processes that intervene between the
acquisition of sensory evidence and commitment to a proposition, behavioral choice, or plan. Progress was
facilitated by the discovery of persistent neural activity in prefrontal and parietal association cortex of the monkey.
By requiring a monkey to communicate its decision with an eye movement, the decision process is observable
as an evolving neural commitment to one action or another. Much is now understood about the neural
mechanisms that underlie the accumulation of evidence, the tradeoff between speed and accuracy, the
assessment of confidence in a decision, and the incorporation of bias. However, it is unknown how these
mechanisms can apply to more complex decisions that are not construed as a dedicated chain from a single
source of evidence to action selection. A critical limitation to progress is a gap in knowledge about the flow of
information between circuits when the path from evidence to action is indirect and flexibly controlled. The current
proposal addresses this problem by developing new behavioral tasks in which the path from sensation to decision
to action is diverted or elaborated, and it exploits emerging tools to measure and manipulate neural activity in
order to characterize interactions between populations of neurons in the service parallel, serial and multiplexed
computations. Aim 1 elucidates context-dependent interactions between two parietal areas that mediate
decisions communicated by an eye or arm movement. Simultaneous multichannel neural recording from the
medial and lateral intraparietal areas will expose patterns of serial inheritance or parallel processing of evidence,
the decision and termination. Aim 2 elucidates the dynamical changes in the representation of a decision when
the decision to action mapping changes during the decision itself. Neural recordings are obtained from the
parietal cortex of monkeys during a perceptual decision that is suspended by an intervening eye movement task.
If successful, Aim 2 will forge a connection between the stability of vision across changes of gaze and the integrity
of a decision across changes of intention. Aim 3 investigates a processing bottleneck that arises when two
streams of evidence support two distinct decisions about a single object, that is, a double decision. Behavioral
evidence from humans and monkeys indicates that sensory evidence can be acquired in parallel, but is
incorporated sequentially into the double-decision. Aim 3 thus promises to elucidate the neural mechanisms of
this serial incorporation and thus begin to explain why mental operations take the time they do. Together the
proposed research will open new areas of comput...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10376232
- **Project number:** 5R01NS113113-04
- **Recipient organization:** COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY HEALTH SCIENCES
- **Principal Investigator:** MICHAEL NEIL SHADLEN
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2022
- **Award amount:** $432,091
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2019-07-15 → 2024-03-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10376232

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10376232, Computational and circuit mechanisms of decision making (5R01NS113113-04). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-22 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10376232. Licensed CC0.

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