Neural Correlates of Decision-Making Across the Brain

Tom Mrsic-Flogel, Director of the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour and Professor of Neuroscience at University College London

The ability to associate ambiguous external events with advantageous actions is fundamental for animal behaviour. To achieve this, the brain must learn to transform relevant sensory input to drive the neural dynamics underlying movement preparation and execution. How this is implemented in the brain remains unresolved, as it requires a brain-wide description of the underlying neural transformations before and after learning. Here we recorded neuronal activity from areas distributed across the brain in untrained mice as well as in expert mice performing a task that requires integrating ambiguous visual stimuli over time. Our results reveal that sensory evidence integration emerges with learning in distributed association-premotor areas where it drives preparatory activity preceding movement.