Conflicting findings on A1 decision encoding stem from task demands and analysis artifacts

Evidence

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…, 4888

Categorization

• XREF: The imperative to dissociate choice activity from stimulus activity on trial subsets is the same logic used in visual two-alternative forced-choice neurophysiology.