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Poster Session C: Friday, August 15, 2:00 – 5:00 pm, de Brug & E‑Hall

Context-dependent modulations of sensory adaptation and pupil-linked arousal as substrates of flexible decision-making

Kara D. McGaughey¹, Joshua I. Gold; ¹University of Pennsylvania, University of Pennsylvania

Presenter: Kara D. McGaughey

Visual decisions typically require the accumulation of uncertain sensory evidence over time. To be effective in the real world, where evidence is often uncertain and unstable, the dynamics of this accumulation process must be flexible. Here, we examined sources of this flexibility by leveraging simultaneous psychophysics, electrophysiology, and pupillometry in non-human primates performing a visual decision-making task. We found that the rate of change of recent stimulus statistics (i.e., context stability) affected both the degree of sensory adaptation in single neurons encoding relevant sensory evidence and the dynamics of pupil diameter. These changes in evidence encoding and pupil-linked arousal depended on whether or not the monkeys tended to use flexible evidence accumulation during a given session, indicating a relationship between sensory adaptation, arousal, and evidence-integration behavior. Collectively, these findings demonstrate that context stability can affect both “bottom-up” evidence encoding in cortex and “top-down” arousal-related modulations that work together to support flexible decision-making behavior.

Topic Area: Reward, Value & Social Decision Making

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