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Letters to Nature
Nature 431, 859-862 (14 October 2004) | doi:10.1038/nature02966; Received 13 April 2004; Accepted 24 August 2004
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A general mechanism for perceptual decision-making in the human brain
H. R. Heekeren1, S. Marrett2, P. A. Bandettini1,2 & L. G. Ungerleider1
- Laboratory of Brain and Cognition, NIMH, NIH, Bethesda, Maryland 20892-1148, USA
- Functional MRI Facility, NIMH, NIH, Bethesda, Maryland 20892-1148, USA
Correspondence to: H. R. Heekeren1 Email: hauke@nih.gov
Abstract
Findings from single-cell recording studies suggest that a comparison of the outputs of different pools of selectively tuned lower-level sensory neurons may be a general mechanism by which higher-level brain regions compute perceptual decisions. For example, when monkeys must decide whether a noisy field of dots is moving upward or downward, a decision can be formed by computing the difference in responses between lower-level neurons sensitive to upward motion and those sensitive to downward motion1, 2, 3, 4. Here we use functional magnetic resonance imaging and a categorization task in which subjects decide whether an image presented is a face or a house to test whether a similar mechanism is also at work for more complex decisions in the human brain and, if so, where in the brain this computation might be performed. Activity within the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is greater during easy decisions than during difficult decisions, covaries with the difference signal between face- and house-selective regions in the ventral temporal cortex, and predicts behavioural performance in the categorization task. These findings show that even for complex object categories, the comparison of the outputs of different pools of selectively tuned neurons could be a general mechanism by which the human brain computes perceptual decisions.
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