Abstract:

To make a decision, we must often combine diverse factors such as sensory inputs, past actions, and estimates of value. There is increasing evidence that the brain does this via a simple operation involving sums and multiplications. This operation is common in machine learning and economics, and has close cousins in psychology. Its neural correlates can now be identified in mice thanks to large-scale neural recordings and for localized inactivations. These methods reveal how the components of an audiovisual choice are progressively computed at key stages in visual cortex, auditory cortex, prefrontal cortex, and superior colliculus. The results point to a single view of how the brain makes a variety of decisions.