Brain-wide dynamics linking sensation to action during decision-making

This study investigated how sensory input, evidence integration, motor planning, and execution are orchestrated across brain areas during perceptual decision-making. Using brain-wide neural recordings in mice performing a visual change detection task, the researchers found that evidence integration emerged across most brain areas in sparse neural populations that drive movement-preparatory activity. Visual responses evolved from transient activations in sensory areas to sustained representations in frontal-motor cortex, thalamus, basal ganglia, midbrain, and cerebellum, enabling parallel evidence accumulation. Learning aligned evidence accumulation to action preparation across dozens of brain regions, resulting in highly distributed and parallelized sensorimotor transformations during decision-making. The study unifies concepts from decision-making and motor control into a brain-wide framework for understanding sensory evidence's control over actions.

Andrei Khilkevich, Michael Lohse, Ryan Low, Ivana Orsolic, Tadej Bozic, Paige Windmill, Thomas D. Mrsic-Flogel