ArticlePLoS biology2020
Decoding the neural dynamics of free choice in humans.
Article in PLoS biology, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- Human local field potentials in motor and non-motor brain areas encode upcoming movement direction.Communications biology · 2024Article
- Theta but not beta activity is modulated by freedom of choice during action selection.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Mapping the emergence of visual consciousness in the human brain via brain-wide intracranial electrophysiology.Innovation (Cambridge (Mass.)) · 2022Article
- Connectomics of human electrophysiology.NeuroImage · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
9 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
How do we choose a particular action among equally valid alternatives? Nonhuman primate findings have shown that decision-making implicates modulations in unit firing rates and local field potentials (LFPs) across frontal and parietal cortices. Yet the electrophysiological brain mechanisms that underlie free choice in humans remain ill defined. Here, we address this question using rare intracerebral electroencephalography (EEG) recordings in surgical epilepsy patients performing a delayed oculomotor decision task. We find that the temporal dynamics of high-gamma (HG, 60-140 Hz) neural activity in distinct frontal and parietal brain areas robustly discriminate free choice from instructed saccade planning at the level of single trials. Classification analysis was applied to the LFP signals to isolate decision-related activity from sensory and motor planning processes. Compared with instructed saccades, free-choice trials exhibited delayed and longer-lasting HG activity during the delay period. The temporal dynamics of the decision-specific sustained HG activity indexed the unfolding of a deliberation process, rather than memory maintenance. Taken together, these findings provide the first direct electrophysiological evidence in humans for the role of sustained high-frequency neural activation in frontoparietal cortex in mediating the intrinsically driven process of freely choosing among competing behavioral alternatives.
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