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Summary: Integration of Sensory and Reward Information during
Perceptual Decision-Making in Lateral Intraparietal
Cortex (LIP) of the Macaque Monkey
Alan E. Rorie1
, Juan Gao2
, James L. McClelland2
, William T. Newsome1
*
1 Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Department of Neurobiology, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, California, United States of America, 2 Department
of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, California, United States of America
Abstract
Single neurons in cortical area LIP are known to carry information relevant to both sensory and value-based decisions that
are reported by eye movements. It is not known, however, how sensory and value information are combined in LIP when
individual decisions must be based on a combination of these variables. To investigate this issue, we conducted behavioral
and electrophysiological experiments in rhesus monkeys during performance of a two-alternative, forced-choice
discrimination of motion direction (sensory component). Monkeys reported each decision by making an eye movement
to one of two visual targets associated with the two possible directions of motion. We introduced choice biases to the
monkeys' decision process (value component) by randomly interleaving balanced reward conditions (equal reward value for
the two choices) with unbalanced conditions (one alternative worth twice as much as the other). The monkeys' behavior, as
well as that of most LIP neurons, reflected the influence of all relevant variables: the strength of the sensory information, the
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