Neural Dynamics of Perceptual Decision Confidence

Speaker: Christopher Fetsch, Ph.D.
Robert G. Merrick Research Chair at the Zanvyl Krieger Mind/Brain Institute
Assistant Professor of Neuroscience
Johns Hopkins University

Abstract: 

Decisions are associated with a degree of confidence, a graded prediction about whether the choice will turn out to be correct. Confidence plays a key role in flexible behavior and is considered a core component of metacognition, but where and how it arises in the brain is not well understood. I will introduce how we investigate this in nonhuman primates using tasks that invite the monkey to ‘bet’ on the outcome of a perceptual judgment, either of visual motion or self-motion from visual and vestibular cues. In the visual motion task, behavioral and neural population analyses suggest that monkeys can process a single stream of evidence in service of two computational goals simultaneously—a categorical decision and associated level of confidence—and illuminate a candidate neural mechanism for this form of parallel processing. The jury is still out on whether and how the brain does this during multisensory self-motion decisions.

Speaker Bio:

Chris Fetsch received his PhD in Neuroscience from Washington University in St. Louis under the supervision of Greg DeAngelis and Dora Angelaki, studying visual-vestibular integration for self-motion perception. He did a postdoctoral fellowship with Mike Shadlen at the University of Washington and Columbia University, using causal tools to study the effects of cortical perturbations on decision confidence. His current work investigates the neural dynamics underlying visual and multisensory decisions, confidence, and sequential decision-making and planning in virtual environments.

Host: Wenhao Zhang, Ph.D.