Apparent decision-related cortical activity can conflate stimulus coding with choice coding

Evidence

We posit that these differences can be attributed to several non-exclusive possibilities. One possibility may be due to the relative perceptual and cognitive demands of the behavioural task: tasks with different demands might differentially engage neurons in core auditory cortex (Bizley and Cohen 2013 ; Nienborg and Cumming 2014 ). A second possibility focuses on how choice-related activity itself is analyzed. In choice analyses, it is imperative to restrict the analysis to those trials in which neural modulation related to choice can be clearly disassociated from the auditory stimulus. If this analysis is not carefully conducted, apparent choice activity may be conflated with stimulus-related activity. Finally, choice-related activity may not reflect a casual contribution of the auditory cortex to decision-making but may simply reflect feedback from higher choice-sensitive areas (Nienborg and Cumming 2009 ) or the structure of the correlated noise (Nienborg et al. 2012 ). — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 4878

Categorization

• QUESTION: The confound between stimulus-related and choice-related activity frames the central methodological danger in reading perceptual decisions from cortex — worth chasing into Nienborg’s choice analyses.